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DAYS OUT AND OTHER PAPERS. 
MORE JONATHAN PAPERS. 
THE JONATHAN PAPERS. 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
Boston and New York 



Days Out and Other Papers 



Days Out 

and Other Papers 

By 
Elisabeth Woodbridge 7/W^ix4 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

1917 






COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY ELISABETH WOODBRIDGB MORRIS 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published November igif 



i:yr- 



MV 15 1917 

©CI,A479073 



Contents 

Days Out 3 

An Unlovely Virtue 12 

A Brief for the Hat 19 

The Cat and the Bell-Collar .... 24 

Clubs among the Cubs 31 

The Cult of the Second-Best .... 37 

An Appendix to Bacon 49 

The Embarrassment of Finality .... 53 

The Wine of Anonymity 61 

The House and the Hill 69 

Humor and the Heroine 77 

The Humor-Fetish 85 

In the Matter of "Faith*' 93 

"In Their Season" 103 

IVIanners and the Puritan Ill 

A Matter of Planes .123 

A Meditation Concerning Forms .... 129 

The Tyranny of Things . 135 

The Tyranny of Facts . . . . . . . 141 

Travelers' Letters 148 

The Novelist's Choice 155 

The Literary Uses of Experience . . .191 



Days Out and Other Papers 



Days Out 

I HAD followed up her advertisement, and 
she stood before me in the dim hallway to 
which she had given me entrance. As she 
fingered the front door knob she told me her 
qualities. "Yes, mum," she concluded, "I 
does my work, mum. I don't never have 
company, and I don't never want days out." 

I protested, "I always give my cook one 
day a week, afternoon and evening." 

"Yes, mum, I know. But when I gets my 
work done, I likes to set right down in the 
kitchen. I don't want to go nowhere. If 
there's somethin' I need, — a spool o' cotton, 
or some stockin's, — why, I most gen'ally 
tells the lady, two-three days ahead, and 
then I runs out of a Saturday evenin', mebbe, 
fer an hour or two." 

"And Sundays.?" I asked faintly, — "! 
let my cook and waitress both go out on 
Sunday afternoon." 

"No, I don't never go out on Sundays at 
all. Ye see, I likes to do my work, and when 



4 DAYS OUT 

I gets through I Ukes to rest. That's the 
kind I am." 

I sighed. Undoubtedly hers was a good 
kind, but undoubtedly I did n't want her. 
I had had one experience of that kind. She 
stayed with me two years, and in all that 
time was never away over a meal-hour. She 
was as good a creature as ever lived, but 
when she left, I said to myself, "Henceforth 
I shall insist on days out." 

The fact is, I have an unconquerable love 
for my own kitchen and pantries. When I 
was a child they were to me realms of bliss, 
where I was often tolerated, often even wel- 
comed. They still seem this to me, and — 
not to be tolerated at all — it is too much ! 

Perhaps that is an exaggeration. My cooks 
have usually tolerated me. They have even 
been polite to me. When I slink half -apolo- 
getically into the kitchen, to have a finger, 
so to speak, in the pie, they bring me dishes, 
and materials, and clear tables for me, and 
try to make believe I am not in the way — at 
least the nice ones do. But they watch me 
furtively. If they are self-righteous, their 
attitude is slightly critical, if they are self- 



DAYS OUT 5 

distrustful, it is apprehensive: — what am I 
going to find out about their pantry? And as 
I am idiotically sensitive to my cook's atti- 
tude, I am conscious of this, and it spoils the 
fun. I slip out of my kitchen — their kitchen 
— and hie me to other parts of the house, 
that seem more truly mine. 

But, on the days out, — ah, those deli- 
cious days out! For the cook's outings are 
my innings. She is happy, too. How she 
works ! The luncheon dishes are whisked out 
of the way, the kitchen is "redd up," and she 
flies to her room to dress. I slip out, glance up 
the back stairs, go to the range and poke the 
fire, change the draughts, shift the kettle a 
little, then hastily retreat to the parlor, and 
play the piano, with the soft pedal down, 
until I hear the back door shut. Then! No 
more piano for me ! I can play the piano any 
time. 

I walk swiftly and boldly out into the 
kitchen — my kitchen — my kitchen. I perch 
on a table and swing my feet, in a glory of 
possession. What shall I make.^^ I go over 
to the range again. Good fire, — good oven. 
I can make anything, anything! A feeling of 



6 DAYS OUT 

power comes over me. I go to the pantry and 
scan its contents. I am always careful to 
have it well stocked on these days, that my 
creative impulses, no matter how freakish, 
may suffer no thwarting by reason of a lack 
of materials. I pick up the cook-book and re- 
sume my perch. I am in no special hurry. 
It is not yet four, and one can do almost any- 
thing between four and half-past six. 

The telephone rings. I go, with my thumb 
in the cooky recipes. I lay the book open 
on the table beside me, and my eye runs over 
the page as I take down the receiver. 

"Yes.^ Yes, this is Mrs. Oh, Mrs. 

Grundy, good afternoon. — What? An- 
other bridge? Are n't you a gay lady! — Oh, 
I 'm so sorry. I don't play well, of course you 
know, but I suppose I would come to fill up, 
only you see I can't. It 's my cook's day out. 
(I'm so glad I ordered molasses this morn- 
ing!) — No, I can't change, she's gone al- 
ready. (Would sugar-cookies be better, I 
wonder.) — Yes, of course, it is inconvenient 
sometimes, but they do want their days out, 
don't they? — Thank you, I 'm sorry too. I 
hope you '11 find somebody, I 'm sure you will. 



DAYS OUT 7 

— Yes, good-bye." I hang up the receiver 
with a sigh of reHef . — Yes, I think, — gin- 
ger cookies. Hester and Tom will be in soon, 

— and they're so good when they're just 
out of the oven. 

I go back, get into my big apron, give an- 
other look to my fire and my oven, and plunge 
in. There arises a delicious odor of spices and 
molasses and butter — an aroma of cooking, 
in short. 

The front door opens and shuts, there is a 
stampede of feet up and downstairs. Then 
the kitchen door bursts open. "Oh, good! 
It 's Sarah 's day out ! Hester ! Come on. It 's 
Sarah's day out!" 

Hester arrives . ^ ' May we make the toast ? ' ' 

May I set the table? " " What do I smell? " 

May I stir?" "May we scrape the bowl?" 

May we make griddle-cakes?" 

It is like a frog-chorus in spring. 

Perhaps I try to be severe. 

"Griddle-cakes? Nonsense! Who ever 
heard of griddle-cakes at night? Ginger 
cookies are queer enough. Besides, they don't 
go well together." 

"No matter! Who cares! We always do 



<< 



(C 



8 DAYS OUT 

nice, queer things when Sarah is out. And 
we can eat up all the cookies as soon as 
they're done, and then they won't interfere 
with the cakes." 

It makes really very little diflFerence how 
it turns out, what things finally get cooked. 
The important thing is, that the cooking goes 
merrily on, and joy reigns. 

It is, I maintain, a joy to rejoice in. I am 
heartily sorry for people who never do their 
own cooking. Cooking is an art, not only 
creative but social. It takes the raw mate- 
rials and converts them into a product that is 
every way pleasing, and that brings the peo- 
ple who enjoy it into social harmony. The 
immediate products do not abide : the better 
they are, the more quickly they vanish; but 
they leave behind something spiritual and 
permanent. A busy mother, who was a won- 
derful cook, once said to me, "Sometimes it 
hardly seems worth while to cook things when 
they go so fast; but then, I think, after all, 
they leave behind them a memory of a jolly 
home-table that does last, so perhaps it 
pays." 

I am sure she was right. The memory of 



DAYS OUT 9 

that home-table has lasted forty years and 
more, and does not yet seem to be fading. 

There are other things to remember about 
that home, there are other things that are 
worth while in any home, but I think that 
in our modern conditions we lose too much of 
the pleasure that comes through doing prac- 
tical things together. Almost all the physical 
work of our daily lives is delegated. Life is 
being systematized on that basis, and though 
there are great gains, there are also losses. 
The change is deeply affecting the character 
and quahty of our hospitality. This is a big 
subject, and I am not going to be drawn into 
it too deeply. All I want to say is, that I be- 
lieve we are letting ourselves be so involved 
in the machinery of our hospitality that we 
are cheated of some of its pleasures. We have 
submitted to certain conventions of "enter- 
taining," and if we cannot satisfy these, we 
do not "entertain." What a pity! And yet, 
while I say this, I am aware that I too am 
enslaved. There are many people whom I 
have not the courage to invite to my house — 
except on my cook's day out. Then I am 
emancipated. There is no one whom I dare 



10 DAYS OUT 

not invite, if I want her, when I am my own 
cook. Mrs. Grundy herself may come and 
welcome. And I believe Mrs. Grundy would 
have a good time. She might not ask to scrape 
the bowl, but I fancy she would be delighted 
to turn the griddle-cakes, or run out for the 
hot toast. 

It is irresistible, this charm of doing things 
one's self, of doing things together. People 
have talked about the simple life until we 
are sick of the name. But we are not sick of 
the thing, the seal thing. And our present 
conditions are not satisfying us. They need 
to be shaken up and recombined. We cannot 
go backward, but we can, perhaps, while 
accepting what is good in the new order, try 
to hold fast to what was good in the old. 
Probably it is best for me not to do all my 
own housework, but it would, I am convinced, 
be little short of a calamity if I never did any. 
To feel that my cook is doing her work con- 
tentedly, that she needs her wages and I need 
my time — this is all very well. But, like 
Antseus, I must touch earth often. I yearn 
for the poker, I hanker for the mixing-bowl, 
I sigh for the frying-pan. Man does not Uve 



DAYS OUT 11 

by bread alone, but neither does he Kve by 
taking thought alone. I love to think, and 
talk, and feel, but I cannot forget that I have 
hands which clamor to be put to use, arms 
which will not hang idle. It does not satisfy 
me to do make-believe work that does not 
need to be done: picture-puzzles and burnt- 
wood and neckties. I want real work, primi- 
tive work. Hurrah for the coal-hod ! Hurrah 
for the tea-kettle! Hurrah for the Day Out! 



An Unlovely Virtue 

When I was a child, I was often not a little 
hampered by the fact that I could not, with 
any comfort, utter an untruth. Not that I 
had any inherent aptitude for truthfulness, — 
on the contrary, I was a lover of devious 
ways, and my nature was framed for deceit, 
— but early training had imposed upon me 
an ineradicable habit of truth-telling. It had 
so wrought that for me the lie was shorn of 
every pleasurable association, and invested 
with painful suggestion. My only compensa- 
tion lay in a dim feeling of superior righteous- 
ness, but this was not very sincere, not very 
constant, and, indeed, not wholly gratifying. 
Gladly would I have relinquished it for the 
ability to tell a good, comfortable lie — not a 
bad, malicious, devouring-lion of a lie, but a 
little harmless, playful-kitten of a lie. Now 
and then, indeed, I did lay hands upon the 
forbidden weapon, but being unfamiliar with 
it, I used it clumsily — lied at the wrong 
time, or in the wrong way, or when there 



AN UNLOVELY VIRTUE 13 

was no need of lying, and I never got any fun 
out of the lie, and seldom any advantage. 

Now that I am quite grown up, my pHght 
is worse, for even the sense of superior right- 
eousness has left me. I have been forced to 
recognize that the most charming, the most 
really admirable, of my friends are in general 
people who can, for the sake of harmony, of 
good fellowship, of friendship, utter the thing 
which is not. This, without disturbing my 
habits of truth-telling, has seriously shaken 
up my theories. 

For one thing, I have come to realize that 
one must often tell a lie in order to convey a 
true impression, since the matter of a lie, as 
of a jest, — 

" lies in the ear 
Of him who hears it, never in the mouth 
Of him who speaks it." 

For example, a certain youth was escorting 
to his steamer a venerable Englishman whose 
name stands high among the dignitaries of 
the Church. Their train was late, and outside 
the Grand Central, as ill luck would have it, 
but a single cab was visible. There was need 
of haste, yet the great man had not been 



14 AN UNLOVELY VIRTUE 

accustomed to hasten, and it looked as though 
the cab would be preempted by some of the 
ardent but unimportant New Yorkers who 
were scurrying toward it. The young man 
singled out an official and said impressively, 
"This is an English duke. He is late for his 
steamer. Get him that cab." The cab was 
theirs. 

Now, according to the precepts in which I 
had been reared, that young man had by his 
act seriously jeopardized his spiritual future. 
Yet, might it not be maintained that he had 
lied in the interests of truth? He said "duke," 
which was not the fact; the official received 
the notion "great man," which was the fact. 
Whereas if he had said, "Here is an EngUsh 
canon, get him a cab," it is safe to say that 
the mind of the worthy official would have 
been filled with confusion, if not with dis- 
tinctly bellicose images totally foreign to the 
occasion. 

But there is another sort of lie whose justi- 
fication cannot be framed after this fashion. 
There is the lie, not in the cause of truth, but 
in the cause of friendliness or of comfort. A 
friend has just given a dinner. "Did you 



AN UNLOVELY VIRTUE 15 

notice that the fish was burned?" she asks. 
You had noticed, every one had noticed. You 
answer, "My dear, I cannot deceive you, it 
was burned." You save your soul, but you 
make your friend miserable. Suppose instead 
that you say cheerfully, "No, indeed, it was 
perfectly delicious"; she will take heart, and 
think, "Well, it was only my nervousness." 
You will have increased the sum of happiness 
in the world — but how about your soul.? 

Suppose, again, that your best friend is 
engaged to be married, but there are reasons 
why she cannot announce the fact. Society 
suspects, society insinuates, finally, society 
asks point-blank, "Celia, is Rosalind engaged 
to Orlando.?" Three courses are open: you 
may keep silent, but that is equivalent to 
saying "yes"; or you may give an evasive 
answer, like the servant who, when asked if 
her mistress was at home, replied, "Was your 
grandmother a monkey.?" The objections to 
this policy are obvious. Or you may take your 
conscience by the throat, look society firmly 
in the eye, and say, "Rosalind engaged.? No, 
indeed ! What in the world could have made 
you think such a thing.? She does n't care for 



16 AN UNLOVELY VIRTUE 

Orlando, and anyway he is really in love with 
Audrey, you know, and only flirting to make 
her jealous." Your conscience may bear for 
days the marks of fingers on its throat, while 
at the same time you will keep saying to your- 
self, in the manner of Henry James's devious- 
minded people, — "But I could n't, could I, 
not have done it. No, I could n't not have 
done it." 

Is there, perhaps, something wrong with a 
training that leaves one no comfortable escape 
from so common a predicament? I myself 
am quite incapable of judging, being hope- 
lessly bigoted in favor of truth-telling. A lie 
still seems, in spite of all arguments, a bad 
thing. But I am driven to wonder whether 
this is not the result of that rigidity of temper 
and of habit which was at once the strength 
and the weakness of our Puritan forbears. 
My grandfather, a man of sternest Puritan 
traditions, came near losing his life through 
that same characteristic. He was going to- 
ward the garden, when a venomous-minded 
cow spied him and marked him for her prey. 
She came on, head down, sharp horns a-prick 
for his gore. A little grandson, taking in the 



AN UNLOVELY VIRTUE 17 

situation, shouted from the rear, *' Cheese it, 
grandpa! Cheese it!" The old gentleman 
heard, he apprehended danger, but he hated 
slang, and this particular phrase had been an 
object of special abhorrence. He turned, grim 
and contemptuous, and used up his moment 
of escape in the withering reply, "Cheese 
what?" The cow arrived, and only the huge 
basket that the old gentleman carried saved 
him from being impaled, principles and all. 
The long horns were buried in the basket, and 
its bearer was hurled backward through the 
garden gate. And to the youngster's puzzled 
query, "WTiy did n't you run, when you 
heard me tell you.^ " there seemed no adequate 
reply. 

If Mr. Brooke, of "Middlemarch," had 
witnessed this scene, I believe his comment 
would have been, "Ah, sir, principles are good 
things in their place, but don't let them carry 
you too far — not too far, you know." 

And it is just possible that this matter of 
truth-telling cannot be settled by any rigid 
rulings whatever. Other virtues may be car- 
ried to excess, why not truthfulness.^ It is 
one of my regrets that I was not clever enough 



18 AN UNLOVELY VIRTUE 

long ago to notice that lying, as such, is not 
forbidden in the Decalogue. We are, it is 
true, commanded not to "bear false witness,'* 
but only false witness against our neighbor. 
About false witness in his behalf nothing 
whatever is said : — that is, mahcious lying is 
forbidden, benevolent lying is left to our dis- 
cretion. I should be quite willing, if my train- 
ing would allow me, to stand with Moses in 
this whole matter. 



A Brief for the Hat 

I ENTERED the crowded railway car and 
walked slowly up the aisle, examining peo- 
ple's backs to see which looked most inviting 
as a seat-mate. Ah! Slim, pretty shoulders, 
and a head beautifully poised! I paused: '*Is 
this seat taken?" 

"No, indeed," a sweet voice answered. 
" Oh! How do you do? Is n't this pleasant? " 

Pleasant, indeed. I sat down happily, and 
as I turned to look in my friend's face I had 
an added thrill of pleasure. There was some- 
thing a-little-more-than-usual about it. I con- 
sidered — yes ! the hat ! It had a little pinch 
in the brim, just in front, making a sort of 
gable-end, below which the face looked out at 
me with added piquancy. Silly idea — that 
pinch ! Yet I was grateful to it for something 
it did to the always lovely face beneath it. 

The incident set me thinking. I have al- 
ways been one to scoflF at the vagaries of 
fashion. They have all seemed about equally 
absurd to me. But now I am growing more 



20 A BRIEF FOR THE HAT 

tolerant, especially in regard to hats. I am, 
in fact, evolving a philosophy of hats. 

It is based on a fundamental and familiar 
trait of human nature. What we see con- 
stantly we cease to see vividly. The faces we 
notice least are those we know — and perhaps 
really love — best; our eyes are a bit jaded 
by following the familiar lines. The same is 
true of pure color. Water and sky are beauti- 
ful, and you may suppose that you are duly 
appreciative of them; but lie on the deck of a 
cat-boat and look at them with your head in 
an unaccustomed position — sideways or up- 
side down — and note how the colors flare 
out upon your vision. Or stay indoors for 
a few weeks, in a room where you do not get 
much outlook, and then go out. You will be 
blinded by the glory of the world. But not 
for long. The glory, alas, fades quickly, and 
habit settles upon you once more. 

With our friends' faces somewhat the same 
thing happens. When we first meet them they 
pique us pleasantly with their unfamiliar line 
and color. Gradually we grow wonted to 
them. The first vision has passed. What 
then.^ Must we turn upside down to look at 



A BRIEF FOR THE HAT 21 

them? Or perhaps turn them upside down? 
Or mew ourselves up, socially speaking, in 
dim back bedrooms, in order to regain that 
coveted first impression? 

Not at all. Fashion has found a way. It 
claps a new hat on our friend's head — a hat 
with a funny nip in it, or a queer wiggle of the 
brim, or a long, soft droop, or a dashing tilt, or 
a jaunty up-fling, or any kind of line what- 
ever, that has distinctive meaning and is not 
the kind of line we have been used to. 

What happens? First of all, we are inter- 
ested, our eyes are challenged anew. Then 
the interest and the challenge give us a fresh 
interpretation. We see the familiar face as 
though it were a stranger's, and we find in it 
things we have never noticed. The funny 
pinch in the brim may bring out all its gayety, 
the long, soft droop may accentuate its pa- 
thos, the jaunty up-fling of the side may give 
it a sudden brave note. I have seen a pretty, 
refined New England face turned suddenly, 
by a sweep of brim and a green feather, 
into the face — pretty and refined still — of 
one who breaks bonds, blood-sister to Robin 
Hood. 



22 A BRIEF FOR THE HAT 

Passing strange, this witchery of hne ! Not 
always working altogether for good. For if 
there are hats that we ''like" on our friends, 
there are also hats that we "don't like." Nat- 
urally. Since a line can evoke good points, it 
can also evoke bad ones, and the wrong line 
may accentuate in a face, not its bravery but 
its coarseness, not its prettiness but its pet- 
tiness, not its pathos but its heaviness. 

Yet even with this danger, one must wel- 
come the change, merely as change. For the 
rest of us, from the neck down, fashion pro- 
vides some possibility of this change that we 
seem so to need. The waist-line may be "worn 
high" one year, and "low" the next. Now 
and then it may even chance — I noted this 
carefully in a good journal a while ago — that 
the waist-line will for a short season be "at 
the waist." Shoulders and hips may be made 
to seem broader or narrower, neck shorter or 
longer, by means best known to those who 
use them. But features cannot be so easily 
manipulated. At least, if they can, the meth- 
ods are not, on the whole, regarded as alto- 
gether desirable or reputable. Fashion does 
not quite dare say, "Noses are this winter 



A BRIEF FOR THE HAT 23 

being worn retrousse, but next spring the tips 
will drop a little, and by summer there is a 
chance that the aquiline line will come in 
again." Or, "Eyes are to be large and round 
this fall, but smaller and narrower toward win- 
ter." Or, ''Lips are fuller than they were in 
July, while chins promise to be longer and 
upper lips shorter than for several years." 

No, this is not yet done. But instead, a way 
has been found to get some of the same effects 
of change. By its means faces seem longer or 
shorter, noses appear to raise or lower their 
little tips, eyes seem to grow large or small, 
slanting or straight, and all by the magic of 
a line, a shift of mass, a flare of color. The 
hat! The hat's the thing! 



The Cat and the Bell-Collar 

It was, by sorrowful count, the twenty- 
seventh bird Fur-Cat had killed that spring 

— song-birds all, and protected by law from 
gun and trap, but not from claw and tooth. 
The decree went forth that Fur-Cat must be 
belled, and a bell-collar was accordingly pro- 
cured. The offending one was called, and 
came, rubbing and purring against chair-legs 
and folk-legs. With a touching confidence he 
submitted to having the collar fastened on, 
and it settled most becomingly into its place 

— a dash of red melting into deep gray fur. 
When he was released there was a moment 
of pause, then the purrings and rubbings 
changed to frantic clawings and chewings, 
aimed at the millstone and designed to re- 
move it instantly and forever from the out- 
raged person of Fur-Cat. There followed a 
dash through the open door and across the 
lawn. 

We felt anxious. Would the fluffy neck 
be clawed to ravehngs.'^ Would insanity set 



THE CAT AND THE BELL-COLLAR 25 

in? Suddenly Fur-Cat reappeared, bounding 
lightly and gayly, scarcely touching earth. 
He came on, with little whirls and pirouet- 
tings, toying daintily with his tail; he leaped 
into the air to paw at some creature of his 
fancy, he chased imaginary worsted balls 
about over the grass and the piazzas. Finally, 
in a burst of enthusiasm born purely of his 
own mood, he shot up a tree and poised him- 
self, in beautiful ease, on an upper branch. 

We laughed, and we marveled a little too. 
Fur-Cat was not young, the days of his kit- 
tenhood lay in a dim past. Yet now the kit- 
ten in him had reasserted itself — nay, more 
than reasserted, for in his antics there had been 
not only all the gay and whimsical impulses 
of youth, but all the power of maturity. It 
was a complete, a satisfying, a deeply artistic 
expression of cat-nature in all its possibihties. 

"If this is what a bell-collar can do," we 
said, "let us give all cats bell-collars." 

But why stop at cats.^ 

For the incident set me wondering how a 
bell-collar could be provided for this or that 
friend of mine — picturing what the effect 
would be. 



26 THE CAT AND THE BELL-COLLAR 

I fancy that most of us need to have worked 
in us just the change that the bell-collar 
brought about in Fur-Cat. Not that I desire 
to see every lady of my acquaintance bound- 
ing lightly about her lawn, 6r posturing in the 
tree-tops, or toying with fancied images of 
the air. These things were right in Fur-Cat 
because he was Fur-Cat. They were the 
expression of his nature and therefore beauti- 
ful. It is a correspondingly complete and sat- 
isfying expression of their inherent nature 
that I long for in the good ladies, and good 
gentlemen, of whom I am thinking. 

It is, perhaps, a habit of the Northern races 
to repress extreme impulses. It is certainly a 
habit of the New Englander. Do we not know 
many and many a character whose natural 
colors are veiled — are overlaid indeed — 
with the deep gray of reserve or the pale gray 
of hesitation.'^ These are they whom I want 
to draw to me for a moment, slip on the bell- 
collar, — and then see! 

Sometimes I have watched this very thing 
happen. There is, for instance, a young man 
who in ordinary life is bound hand and foot 
by his own self -consciousness. Eye and tongue 



THE CAT AND THE BELL-COLLAR 27 

are held in slavery to it, and he walks as one 
compelled, looking neither to the right nor to 
the left. He sits, as it were, always on the 
edge of his chair. But give him a rag or two 
of costume, and a song to sing, and a miracle 
is wrought. He grows taller, his step is firm 
and elastic, his bearing has the grace of com- 
plete ease, he looks the world gayly in the eye, 
he not only sings his song and acts his part, 
but he flings out extempore witticisms and 
meets unforeseen emergencies with blithe un- 
concern. On a wave of sympathy and suc- 
cess he is carried, not out of himself but into 
himself. He enters into possession of his own 
personahty. 

And when the bell-collar is off, is the spell 
over.^ Not quite. Something remains. Each 
time the transformation is effected it leaves 
behind it traces. Some day, I beheve, he will 
no longer need the material bell-collar. He 
will carry one, as Rosalind did no^ carry her 
doublet and hose, in his disposition. 

There are many to whom the bit of rag and 
the song, or the speech, bring a similar eman- 
cipation. But there are more for whom these 
would never break chains, but rather fasten 



28 THE CAT AND THE BELL-COLLAR 

them tighter. Fortunately, there are other 
bell-collars, and not the least among them is 
raiment. Undoubtedly clothes are abused, 
yet they have their uses, aside from those of 
protection. Look at Cinderella! Does any 
one suppose she would have come into her 
own place without the help of those gorgeous 
gowns and those little glass shppers? Does 
any one fancy her manners were the same, 
her eyes as bright, her wit as ready, when she 
sat among the cinders in her dingy rags.^ No 
indeed! The slippers and the gowns and the 
golden coach were an enfranchisement; they 
were her bell-collar. The Prince was never so 
dull as to fall in love with a thing of satin and 
glass. What charmed him was the adorable 
spirit within, which these had served to re- 
lease. 

Would that we had each of us a fairy god- 
mother to fasten on us, at the right moment, 
just the right, the magic collar! 

The world, out of fairy books, is chary in 
furnishing its fairy godmothers, yet most of 
us have friends at whose touch we become 
more truly and happily ourselves than at 
other times. They seem able to endow us. 



THE CAT AND THE BELL-COLLAR 29 

through some magic of their own, with the 
beauteous vestments and the glass shppers 
that free the spirit. These are our fairy god- 
mothers. We do well to love them and pay 
them good heed, for through them we may 
enter into such possession of the precious 
gifts that we need have no dread of the strik- 
ing hour. This, we must suppose, is what 
Cophetua did for his beggar-maid. At his 
glance, the queen in her blossomed, which 
later all the world could see. 

Some there are, indeed, who are able to 
play the beneficent part, not to one alone, nor 
to two or three, but to all whom they meet. 
They go among people flinging bell-collars to 
right and left. I have seen such a person come 
into a room, and instantly every one in it 
grew more vivid, more truly and happily 
individual. These fairy godmothers them- 
selves are never quite aware of the spell they 
exert; they think, perhaps, that the room was 
the same before they entered it. They see 
people, inevitably, with their bell-collars on, 
and to them the world never looks as it often 
does to the rest of us — a little colorless, a 
little dull, a little unresponsive. 



30 THE CAT AND THE BELL-COLLAR 

Success to their magic wands ! It is through 
them, if at all, that the boulevards of the 
world grow rich with golden coaches, and 
the assemblies of the world grow bright with 
the gleaming robes and crystal slippers of 
spiritual enfranchisement. 



Clubs among the Cubs 

"Mother, I don't think it's fair!" 

Jack burst into the room and dumped him- 
seK on the lounge. 

"What is n't fair?" said his mother. 

"I got up a club with Ned and Tommy, 
and they 'lected me president, and then I 
just went into the house for a minute, and 
while I was gone they 'lected Tommy presi- 
dent!" 

About half the history of the world is typi- 
fied in this incident, and about three quarters 
of the history of politics. But the aspect of it 
that particularly struck me when I heard the 
story was the extreme youth of the protago- 
nist. Jack was seven years old. It seemed to 
me that things were beginning early. 

As always happens, once my attention was 
directed to the matter, other little incidents 
of a similar nature began to present them- 
selves to my notice. Six-year-old Paul was 
taking me for a walk up the farm-lane. 

"That 'th where they 'nithated me," he 



32 CLUBS AMONG THE CUBS 

lisped, trying to give his momentous words 
the air of a careless aside. 

"They what?" I asked, surveying the gray 
rock haK buried in huckleberry bushes. 

" 'Nithated," said Paul slowly. 

"What's that.^" I asked again. 

I was really very stupid, but children bear 
a great deal from grown-ups. 

''Why, don't you know.^^" said Paul pa- 
tiently. "You put your hand on it, and hold 
the other hand up, and then you thay — I 
muth n't tell you what you thay, becauthe 
you're not a member; and, anyway" — this 
was added with a far-away look — "I gueth 
I've forgotten what it wath." 

"So you're a member .f^ What is it.^^ A 
club.^" 

"A thothiety,— the D. L. S." 

"What does that mean.?" 

"That 'th a thecret. It 'th a thecret tho- 
thietv." 

"Oh, I see. And what do you do.? Is that a 
secret too.?" 

"Oh, we have meetingth — we don't do 
very much — 'thept when there 'th thome- 
body to 'nithate." 



CLUBS AMONG THE CUBS 33 

"And that happens rather often, I sup- 
pose," I suggested. 

"Ye-e-th," doubtfully. "They 'nithated 
me latht week." 

"And who else is in the society .f^" 

"Willie and Kate. They have two other 
thothietieth, but I'm only in thith one." 

While I was still brooding over this con- 
versation, I picked up a shp of paper in a 
friend's house, and, without realizing that I 
was intruding on mysteries, read as follows: — ; 

Dear Lillie — 

I am going to get up another club Its 
called the S T S If you come over after school 
I will tell you what it means You can join it 
and Billy is in it Then we can conect up with 
the other clubs, and have an afiUiation 

Yours truly 

James Burton 

I was deeply impressed with this document, 
especially with the "afiUiation" idea, and I 
inquired into the ages of the persons involved 
in the scheme. James is nine years old, Lillie 
is seven, Billy is eight. Evidently we are in 



34 CLUBS AMONG THE CUBS 

an organizing age, and the new generation is 
not going to be left behind. 

Lately, with the desire of finding out some- 
thing about these matters from another set of 
witnesses, I have been sounding various par- 
ents on the subject. As soon as I mention the 
word "clubs," I am sure to see some sort of 
vivid expression flash up in the face of my 
interlocutor. Sometimes it is amusement, 
and there follows a funny story about some 
of the school societies; sometimes it is sarcas- 
tic; sometimes it is rather desperate. One 
mother confesses that she has forbidden her 
little daughter to belong to any school club 
whatever; one father has sent his boy away 
to boarding-school to escape the problems and 
dangers of high-school secret societies. Ob- 
viously, I have stumbled on a hve issue, and 
one that is puzzling wiser heads than mine. 

Puzzled I surely am. In "my day" there 
were baseball clubs for the boys, and sewing 
or cooking clubs for the girls, and there an 
end, with no secret societies at all. Moreover, 
the baseball clubs really played baseball, and 
the sewing and cooking clubs really sewed 
and cooked, or tried to. But that was long 



CLUBS AMONG THE CUBS 35 

ago. In those days, too, the club Hfe of the 
grown-ups was correspondingly simple; a 
charitable sewing society for the ladies, where 
they met to sew and talk; a club for the men, 
where they smoked and talked politics or 
science or whatever interested them; and for 
men and women together, a euchre club, and 
perhaps a "literary" club. 

But the plot has thickened. We are beset 
by clubs on all sides, and one of the chief 
problems of life, if I can trust my observa- 
tion, seems to be how to keep out of the wrong 
ones and get into the right ones, while, with 
regard to the officering of them, the predica- 
ment of the martyr Jack may be taken as 
tj^ical. I have even been assured, by a very 
high authority indeed, that most clubs are 
started by people who have a craving to be 
president of something, and who therefore 
get up a club to meet this "long-felt want." 
Moreover, it is apparently a widespread de- 
sire, this wish to "conect up" with other 
clubs and make an "affiliation." If, then, the 
old cocks — and hens — are crowing and 
cackling after this fashion, what else is to be 
expected of the young ones.^ 



36 CLUBS AMONG THE CUBS 

But I have no intention of drifting into an 
argument. I am merely observing, and won- 
dering how it is all going to come out. Being, 
in general, no friend to repressive measures, 
I have a feeling that it will do little good to 
prohibit clubs and secret societies among the 
children. I should rather favor letting them 
go on, if they must, but giving them some- 
thing really to do. Societies that chiefly 
"hold meetings," and "initiate," seem to my 
plain mind to be in need, not so much of re- 
pressing, as of being given a job. And mean- 
while, I confess that I am sorry for Jack, I 
admire James, and I am proud that I know 
Paul and Lillie. 



The Cult of the Second-Best 

All that I know 

Of a certain star 
Is, it can throw 

(Like the angled spar) 
Now a dart of red. 

Now a dart of blue; 
Till my friends have said 
They would fain see, too. 
My star that dartles the red and the blue! 
Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled. 

They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it. 
What matter to me that their star is a world? 
Mine opens its soul to me; therefore I love it. 

Were I asked to choose the short poem 
which most suggestively expressed the atti- 
tude of our age, I beheve I should pause long 
before rejecting this one of Browning's. If 
there is one trait more characteristic than 
another of our spiritual attitude, it is our 
proneness to challenge the Accepted. "Down 
with the Obvious" is our intellectual war- 
cry. It is more than a principle with us; it is 
a habit. We are growing temperamentally 
incapable of taking things for granted; we 
are the sworn enemies of conventional stand- 
ards, both in taste and in morals; we are the 



38 THE CULT OF THE SECOND-BEST 

champions of individual judgment. In the 
realm of morals this is bringing about conse- 
quences so vast that I must back away from 
even the mention of them. In the realm of 
taste it is producing conditions, to one aspect 
of which I should like to call attention. 

Which brings us back to our poem. May 1 
be pardoned for laying unhallowed hands on 
a thing so exquisite! It is like dissecting a 
butterfly. But perhaps we need not hurt him, 
and we can set him free again in a moment. 

In plain English, then, the poem means, 
that I love a certain star because of qualities 
in it appreciated, I find, in a peculiar way, by 
me. I do not share this appreciation with 
others. When they press in upon me, to par- 
take of my vision, "it stops like a bird, like a 
flower hangs furled." But when I, its dis- 
coverer and owner, look at it, it "opens its 
soul to me," and — note well the phrase — 
"therefore I love it." As for the others — the 
crowd — let them have Saturn and welcome 
— Saturn, whose wonders any one can see 
with half an eye. I admit that Saturn is in a 
sense greater, but I am happy with my own 
lesser thing, because it is mine. 



THE CULT OF THE SECOND-BEST 39 

There we have it! A turning away from 
accepted greatness, greatness in the appreci- 
ation of which all can take part, to the minor 
beauty whose enjoyment can be ours alone. 
It is not purely a love of beauty, then, that 
dominates us, but a glory in discovery, a 
pride of ownership, and, perhaps, an instinct 
of withdrawal from the crowd. 

And now we may let our butterfly go again 
— praying that we have not brushed the 
least mote of bloom from his wings. 

It is this attitude, I think, which is pecu- 
liarly characteristic of the age we live in. It 
is not, of course, the exclusive possession of 
our own time. Touchstone betrayed it, when, 
in his best court tones, he introduced Audrey 
as ''A poor virgin, sir, an ill-favored thing, 
sir, but mine own." And we can go back even 
further if we care to inquire curiously. Prob- 
ably the man who black-balled Aristides be- 
cause he was tired of hearing him called ''The 
Just" had the same feeling — which is only 
another illustration of the modernness of the 
Greeks. He was expressing a dislike of the 
Obvious, a rebellion against the Accepted, 
which we can all understand. He was tired of 



40 THE CULT OF THE SECOND-BEST 

Saturn. Probably he had some small star of 
his own that, for the reasons we have just 
been considering, he liked better. 

It is, in fact, a trait of human nature, which 
just now is getting the upper hand a little 
more than usual. For the worship of the gods 
has always been encroached upon by the cults 
of the demigods. There is something cloying 
about the continual contemplation of unques- 
tioned greatness, especially if the experience 
has to be shared with the crowd. This is, of 
course, the real reason why the orthodox con- 
ceptions of Heaven are so unattractive. And, 
equally of course, this was what was the mat- 
ter with Lucifer — ah, here at last we are at 
the very beginning of the whole trouble! He 
began it ! Not Browning, nor Touchstone, nor 
the Greek mugwump, but Lucifer. He was 
the first to set up an individual judgment, to 
rebel against the domination of the Obvious. 

There is nobody to blame, then, but a per- 
son who is so in the habit of taking blame that 
he can take a little more without turning a 
hair. Upon his broad shoulders we may load 
the restlessness of all the uneasy spirits since 
the time of the First One. 



THE CULT OF THE SECOND-BEST 41 

There is something to be said for them. 
The Great of the world do get a good deal of 
handling. They show it a little. The grass is 
trodden down all around them, their toes are 
worn blunt by being kissed, and they are 
bes tarred and be-photographed out of all 
whooping. One can hardly think of them 
apart from an atmosphere of perfunctory 
admiration of the tourist sort, to which there 
clings an aroma of lunch-boxes and note- 
books and cameras and picture post-cards. 
We cannot approach them without feeling 
ourselves one of a rabble. "Ugh!" we growl, 
'* let's get out of this! Come along over to 
my Little-Great-One, that nobody else is pay- 
ing any attention to. Here we are, — no 
crowd, no noise, — the place is ours ! " 

Ah, yes, there is indeed something in it. 
There is a good deal in it. And so the cult of 
the Little Great supplants the worship of the 
Great Great. 

There is no special harm in this so long as 
we remember that there is a difference be- 
tween the Great Great and the Little Great. 
So long as we do not forget that, with one day 
of such treatment as the Great Great are 



42 THE CULT OF THE SECOND-BEST 

imperturbably submitting to through the 
ages, the Little Great would be reduced to 
pulp. And so long as we do not blink the 
fact that in pursuing our cult we are yielding 
to our love for exclusiveness. 

And though there is something to be said 
for these uneasy spirits, there is also some- 
thing to be said against them, certainly when 
we are concerned with the things of the 
spirit. For there is a difference between the 
material and the immaterial Great Great. 
Take the Matterhorn — it is a Great Great 
in its own line, no doubt, but perhaps — just 
perhaps — we might be excused for prefer- 
ring a lower peak with solitudes around it, 
to the Matterhorn with a foreground of hard- 
boiled-egg shells and oiled-paper sandwich- 
wrappers. I am not accusing the Matterhorn 
of such a foreground. The Touristland Im- 
provement Society probably keeps it cleared 
up. I am only suggesting a hypothetical case, 
in which a material Great Great might lose 
some of its — shall we call it bloom .^^ 

But with the immaterial Great Great the 
case is somewhat altered. Its audience-rooms 
may be always thronged, yet we do not have 



THE CULT OF THE SECOND-BEST 43 

to dodge the elbows of the crowd, or peer 
under their hats in order to get a view. We 
can, in a sense, forget them. Only in a sense, 
to be sure. For the throng, though invisible, 
has left its traces. The Bible, for instance, 
has suffered from too much handling. No one 
who has been "properly" brought up, can, I 
fancy, ever read any of its great writings and 
get a perfectly pure and fresh vision of their 
greatness. There are no egg-shells and sand- 
wich-papers, indeed, but the fore-ground and 
the back-ground and the middle-ground are 
littered with altar-cloths and stained glass, 
with snatches of hymns and illuminated texts 
and the debris of sermons. Not with the most 
intense detachment of spirit can we escape 
them entirely. If on this account we leave 
the Bible and betake ourselves say, to the 
Apocrypha, we shall be free from all this. 
We can be quite by ourselves, and we shall 
find many wonderful and beautiful things, 
but in the end we shall be making a mistake 
if we do not go back to our Bible again, 
hymns and texts and sermons and all. 

The next greatest sufferer among the Great 
Great is Shakespeare. It is hard to read 



44 THE CULT OF THE SECOND-BEST 

Shakespeare with an undivided mind, be- 
cause one keeps running up against so many 
"famihar quotations." Moreover, some of us 
have ''prepared" Shakespeare for the class- 
room, for college-entrance examinations, for 
B.A. andM.A. and Ph.D. examinations, and 
the air of the study hangs heavy about him. 
I knew a young woman once who felt this so 
keenly that in selecting four plays to be 
studied by her class she proposed four of the 
poorest — one of them not surely authentic — 
because, as she said, the great plays were so 
*' hackneyed." It seemed to me that though 
her plight was hard, she had not chosen the 
best way out. It still seems so. And if we do 
not find the better way of escape it is partly 
our own fault. 

Can we not walk free with Shakespeare 
and enjoy his companionship because of this 
network of trappings — glossaries and notes 
and quotations and essays — in which we are 
involved.? Do our steps drag.? Are our feet 
clogged.? Do we slip harness and escape to 
some companion whose charm, perhaps, is 
less, but with whom we can race along un- 
trammeled.? The loss is ours. If we were just 



THE CULT OF THE SECOND-BEST 45 

a little cleverer, we could do something still 
better: we could give Shakespeare the wink 

— he would be ready — and both together 
we would duck, plunge, twist, and — there 
we are! Free! and off together up the wind, 
with none to follow. And then what a day we 
should have! 

From the brightness and the wonder of 
such a day does it, perhaps, detract some- 
thing, the consciousness that we are not the 
first? Perhaps it does, because we are, as we 
have admitted, human. There is a joy in dis- 
covery quite apart from the quality of the 
thing discovered. The first man to conquer a 
peak gets something that those who follow 
never find. But this — the bead on the cup 

— is not for us, we come too late. Unless, 
indeed, we may find it in the discovery of 
some new Great Great among our contempo- 
raries. Some of us may have had intoxicating 
moments when we have at least thought we 
had done this. 

But for the most part, the peaks have been 
climbed. Shakespeare and Sophocles and the 
rest have been read and read. When we say 
"Wonderful, wonderful, and most wonder- 



46 THE CULT OF THE SECOND-BEST 

ful!" we must be content to know that mil- 
lions have said it before us, and millions will 
say it after us. And if we are not content, 
if our pride is humiliated and our love of 
exclusiveness is outraged by this knowledge, 
what then? Shall we allow ourselves to be 
driven by our own weakness eternally to the 
society of the Little Great? Perhaps, better 
than rebellion against the Obvious, would be 
an endeavor to reconquer the Obvious. Per- 
haps the thing that would pay best of all 
would be to strive for freshness of mind, 
freshness of attack, in the appreciation of 
these same old Great Great. 

For the greatness of the Great, though 
obvious in one way, in another way is not 
obvious at all, and when we turn aside from 
them, we are perhaps moved not merely by 
intellectual priggishness, but also by intel- 
lectual indolence. The dainty musical trifle 
rests us when the great symphony tires us. 
It is easier to appreciate the little things, the 
pretty sketches, the rare bits, exquisite but 
slight, whose beauty we can in a sense see all 
around. Easy, and also perfectly defensible 
if we do it only as a part of our aesthetic expe- 



THE CULT OF THE SECOND-BEST 47 

rience. But if it becomes the whole of it, we 
are in danger of faUing into a sterile round of 
easy enjoyment which leaves us where it 
found us. We shall never grow spiritually 
keen and muscular in this way. It is as if a 
man were to spend his leisure all his life in 
playing jack-straws when he might be play- 
ing chess. If we spend all our time on the 
second-best we shall lose something out of 
our intellectual and aesthetic equipment, 
something of virility, something of largeness 
and breadth, something of the power and the 
willingness to expend energy in the under- 
standing and appreciation of the greatest 
things. And this ought not to be lightly 
given up. 

A fresh vision of the Great Great is worth 
achieving. It is worth waiting for. I had 
read "King Lear" many times, but once I 
read it, and suddenly it took hold of me in a 
new way, and carried me along — breathless, 
overwhelmed, to the end, I had read the 
"Antigone" over and over, but once when 
I came to it, it swept me up into its own clear 
air: I saw it steadily and saw it whole. Expe- 
riences like these, incommunicable as they 



48 THE CULT OF THE SECOND-BEST 

are, are to be above all desired, above all 
prized. When one has had them it is hard to 
see how one could for long be content with 

less. 



An Appendix to Bacon 

I HAVE often thought that Lord Bacon might 
have known even more about revenge than 
he did, if he had observed it in children. For, 
being a kind of "wild justice," its features 
are clearest before they have been blurred 
by the conventions of a society wherein jus- 
tice is supposed to have been tamed, if not 
actually domesticated. 

Instances of the juvenile type have at- 
tracted my notice from time to time, and I 
am moved to record three of them, for the 
use of some future philosopher. 

One was a scheme planned by a practical- 
minded little boy, to take effect against his 
mother. He spent one entire afternoon, and 
enlisted the services of his friends, in making 
what he called "dirt-traps" along the garden 
walk, — a system of simple levers so arranged 
that any person who passed would strike the 
foot against one end of a stick, making the 
other end fly up and fling a little bunch of 
earth into his face. Of course the person 



50 AN APPENDIX TO BACON 

passing was to be the unnatural mother; after 
so much industry on his part, Providence 
would surely take care of that. I forget 
whether Providence did, but as I look back, I 
like the boy's attitude of mind. He has since 
become a scientist, with a good grasp of the 
concrete. 

Of quite another type was the revenge car- 
ried out by a Uttle girl I knew. She had a 
big brother who teased, and a bigger brother 
who did n't, because he was too big. Now and 
then she could pay back some of her scores, 
but the accumulation of those unpaid touched 
her soul with gloom. At last the children 
gave a play, wherein she, as the Princess Ariel, 
rejected Prince Percival (big brother) and 
eloped with a poor suitor (bigger brother). 
At a certain point in the play Percival was 
repulsed with the words, "I spurn thee, vil- 
lain! hence! away!" During the rehearsals it 
was suggested by the coach that the princess 
might accentuate her scorn by touching the 
kneeling youth with the toe of her slipper. 
She did so, gently, tasting the pleasure of this 
new kind of revenge. But on the night of the 
performance, excitement unseated such pow- 



AN APPENDIX TO BACON 51 

ers of restraint as a short life had furnished 
her with; the wild justice burst forth, and 
the gilt-slippered little foot did not gently 
spurn, it hotly kicked. The princely lover, 
unprepared, tumbled over on his side and 
rolled beautifully "down center." The audi- 
ence applauded such spirited acting, and per- 
haps only one of those present guessed how in 
that moment the wrongs of years had been 
wiped out by a vengeance that was satisfy- 
ing because at once public, concrete, and 
symbolic. 

But that which I admire most of all was 
planned by a little country boy — he became 
a successful city man — whose heart was 
filled with bitterness toward his school- 
teacher. Not for him were the crass forms of 
immediate retaliation, but at recess, as he 
ate his apple, he thought, and the gray eyes 
grew dark and intent. The apple was eaten, 
but the seeds — ah, they were shut tight in 
the small fist until an unmolested moment 
came. Then each little brown speck was care- 
fully pushed under the edge of the school- 
house and jammed down, by black-nailed 
fingers, into the earth. The boy went back 



52 AN APPENDIX TO BACON 

to his books, but the poet's brain behind the 
gray eyes saw into the years to come, — saw 
the unrighteous teacher still at her desk, the 
hateful little schoolhouse still standing, while, 
outside, those little seeds were bursting, root- 
ing downward, and stretching upward; saw 
the young shoots gaining strength, brac- 
ing and straining at the house timbers, till 
they stirred and cracked; saw the house 
wrenched and tottering, the teacher grasping 
her reeling desk, and then — ruins, with 
blooming apple trees rising in triumph over 
them ! 

And meantime, the gray eyes were bent 
on the book, content to wait until the future 
should right the past. Magnificent! 



The Embarrassment of Finality 

"Live as if each moment were your last." 
How often I used to come across such advice 
in the books that I read! At least it seemed 
often to me — too often. For while I ac- 
cepted it as being probably good advice if 
one could follow it, yet follow it I could n't. 

For one thing, I could never bring myself 
to feel this **last"-ness of each moment. I 
tried and failed. I was good at make-believe, 
too, but this was out of all reason. 

I still fail. The probability that each mo- 
ment is really my last is, I suppose, growing 
theoretically greater as the clock ticks, yet I 
am no more able to realize it than I used to 
be. I no longer try to; and, what is more, I 
hope I never shall. I hope that when my last 
moment really comes, it may slip by unrecog- 
nized. If it does n't, I am sure I don't know 
what I shall do. 

For I find that this sense of finality is not 
a spur, but an embarrassment. Only con- 
sider: suppose this moment, or let us say the 



54 THE EMBARRASSMENT OF FINALITY 

next five minutes, is really my last — what 
shall I do? Bless me, I can't think! I really 
cannot hit upon anything important enough 
to do at such a time. Clearly, it ought to be 
important, something having about it this 
peculiar quality of finality. It should have 
finish, it should in some way be expressive of 
something — I wonder what? It should leave 
a good taste in one's mouth. If I consulted 
my own savage instincts I should probably 
pick up a child and kiss it; that would at all 
events leave a good taste. But, suppose there 
were no child about, or suppose the child 
kicked because he was playing and didn't 
want to be interrupted — what a fiasco ! 

Moreover, one must consider the matter 
from the child's standpoint: he, of course, 
ought also to be acting as if each moment 
were his last. And in that case, ought he to 
spend it in being kissed by me? Not neces- 
sarily. At any rate, I should be selfish to 
assume this. Perhaps he ought to wash his 
hands, or tell his little sister that he is sorry he 
slapped her. Perhaps I ought to tell my little 
sister something of that sort — if it was n't 
slapping, it was probably something else. 



THE EMBARRASSMENT OF FINALITY 55 

But no, five minutes are precious. If they 
are my last, she will forgive me anyway — 
de mortuis, etc. ; it would be much more neces- 
sary to do this if I were sure of going on Uving 
and meeting her at meals; then, indeed — 

Yet there must be something that one 
ought to do in these five minutes. There is 
enough that needs doing, — at least there 
would be if they were not my last. There is 
the dusting, and the marketing, and letter- 
writing, and sewing, and reading, and seeing 
one's friends. But under the pecuHar circum- 
stances, none of these things seems suitable. 
I give it up.^ The fact must be that very early 
in life — before I can remember — I formed 
a habit of going on living, and of expecting 
to go on, which became incorrigible. And 
the contrary assumption produces hopeless 
paralysis. As to these last five minutes that 
I have been trying to plan for, I think I will 
cut them out, and stop right here. It will do 
as well as anywhere. Though I still have a 
hankering to kiss that baby! 

I might think the trouble entirely with 
myself, but that I have noticed indications 
of the same thing in others. Have you ever 



56 THE EMBARRASSMENT OF FINALITY 

been met by an old friend at a railroad sta- 
tion where one can stop only a few moments? 
I have. She comes down for a gHmpse of me; 
good of her, too! We have not met for years, 
and it will be years before we can meet again. 
It is almost like those fatal last moments of 
life. I stand on the car-platform and wave, 
and she dashes out of the crowd. "Oh, there 
you are! Well — how are you.f^ Come over 
here where we can talk. — Why, — you're 
looking well — yes, I am, too, only I 've been 
having a horrid time with the dentist." 
(Pause.) "Are you having a pleasant jour- 
ney .^^ — Yes, of course, those vestibule trains 
are always hideously close. I've been in a 
hot car, too. — I thought I 'd never get here, 
the cars were blocked — you know they're 
tearing up the streets again — they always 
are." (Pause.) "How's Alice .'^ — That's nice. 

— And how's Egbert .f^ — Yes, you wrote me 
about his eyes. What a good-looking hat 
you have! I hated to come down in this old 
thing, but my new one did n't come home — 
she promised, too — and I just had to see you. 

— Do look at those two over there ! How can 
people do such things on a public platform. 



THE EMBARRASSMENT OF FINALITY 57 

do you see? I '11 move round so you can look. 
■ — Why, it isn't time yet, is it? Oh, dear! 
And we have n't really begun to talk. Well, 
stand on the step and then you won't get 
left. — Yes, I '11 write. So glad to have seen 
you. — Going to be gone all winter? — Oh, 
yes, I remember, you wrote me. Well, good- 
bye, good-bye!" 
The train pulls out a few feet, then pauses 

— one more precious moment for epochal 
conversation — we laugh. "Why, I thought 
it had started — Well, give my love to Alice 

— and I hope Bert's eyes will be better — I 
said, I hoped his eyes — Egberfs eyes — will 
be better — will improve,'^ 

The train starts again. "Good-bye once 
more!" I stand clutching the car door, hold- 
ing my breath lest the train change its mind 
a second time. But it moves smoothly out, 
I give a last wave, and reenter my car, trying 
to erase the fatuous smile of farewell from my 
features, that I may not feel too foolish before 
my fellow passengers. I sink into my seat, 
feeling rather worn and frazzled. No more 
five-minute meetings for me if I can help it! 
Give me a leisurely letter, or my own 



58 THE EMBARRASSMENT OF FINALITY 

thoughts and memories, until I can spend 
with my friend at least a half day. Then, 
perhaps, when we are not oppressed by the 
importance of the speeding moments, we may 
be able to talk together with the unconscious 
nonchalance that makes talk precious. 

I have never heard a death-bed conversa- 
tion, but I fancy it must be something like 
this, only worse, and my suspicions are' so far 
corroborated by what I am able to glean from 
those who have witnessed such scenes — in 
hospitals, for instance. Friends come to visit 
the dying man; they sit down, hug one knee, 
make an embarrassed remark, drop that knee 
and pick up the other ankle. They rise, 
walk to the foot of the bed, then tiptoe back 
uneasily. Hang it, what is there to say! If 
he was n't dying there would be plenty, but 
that sort of talk does n't seem appropriate. 
What is appropriate — except hymns? 

When my time comes, defend me from this ! 
I shall not repine at going, but if my friends 
can't talk to me just as they always have, I 
shall be really exasperated. And if they 
offer me hymns — ! 

No — last minutes, or hours, for me might 



THE EMBARRASSMENT OF FINALITY 59 

better be discounted at once — dropped out. 
I have a friend who thinks otherwise, at least 
about visits. She says that it makes no differ- 
ence how you behave on a visit, so long as 
you act prettily during the last day or two. 
People will remember that, and forget the 
rest. Perhaps; but I doubt it. I think we are 
much more apt to remember the middles of 
things, and their beginnings, than their end- 
ings. Almost all the great pieces of music 
have commonplace endings; well enough, of 
course, but what one remembers are bits here 
and there in the middle, or some wonderful 
beginning.' If one is saying good-bye to a 
beloved spot, and goes for a last glimpse, 
does one really take that away to cherish.'^ 
No, I venture to say, one forgets that, and 
remembers the place as one saw it on some 
other day, some time when one had no 
thought of finality, and was not consciously 
storing up its beauty to be kept against the 
time of famine. 

One makes a last visit to a friend, and all 
one remembers about it is its painful "last"- 
ness. The friend herself one recalls rather as 
one has known her in other, happy, thought- 



60 THE EMBARRASSMENT OF FINALITY 

less moments, which were neither last nor 
first, and therefore most rich because most 
unconscious. 

Live as if each moment were my last? Not 
at all! I know better now. I choose to live 
as if each moment were my first, as if life had 
just come to me fresh. Or perhaps, better 
yet, to live as if each moment were, not last, 
for that gives up the future, nor first, for that 
would relinquish the past, but in the midst 
of things, enriched by memory, lighted by 
anticipation, aware of no trivialities, because 
acknowledging no finality. 



The Wine of Anonymity 

Let me not be misunderstood. I am not now 
thinking of the pleasures connected with the 
anonymous letter — the letter which, in dis- 
guised hand, warns Benedick not to trust 
Beatrice too far, or advises Beatrice to follow 
up Benedick and find out what he does be- 
tween eight and nine of a summer evening. 
In the fashioning of such epistles there may 
be* — there must be — a certain gratification, 
but it has never come my way. I have never 
experienced either the thrill of writing such a 
letter or the pang of receiving one. 

Nor do I mean the fierce but coward joy 
of asserting, in an open letter, unsigned, that 
lago is a liar and a villain, and escaping the 
annoyance of a libel suit in consequence. This 
pleasure also I have never tasted, though I 
really have strong opinions about lago, while 
disliking libel suits. 

No. The wine of which I speak is milder 
than this and has no bitter after-taste. With- 
out having either oflacious warnings or malig- 



62 THE WINE OF ANONYMITY 

nant vituperation to utter, I yet find a certain 
gentle exhilaration in being able to express 
my thoughts without a signature. 

I am, I believe, not the only one to feel 
this. The other writers in the Contributors' 
Club,^ entering its doors, which close softly 
behind them and tell no tales, and approach- 
ing its social hearth in the cozy club-room 
whose walls have ears, perhaps, but no 
tongues, — they, too, I notice, carry them- 
selves with a more buoyant and jaunty bear- 
ing than the Olympians who sit enthroned in 
the Body of the Magazine. There is a glare 
of publicity about Olympus that even the 
Gods felt — witness the way they slipped 
into human disguise or drew on the tarn-helm 
when they wanted to be really at ease. Often, 
indeed, this was when they were up to mis- 
chief, but not always. The Club members are 
never up to mischief, and yet we like to be 
nameless. We are not saying anything that 
we are ashamed of, and yet — and yet — it is 
such fun to use the tarn-helm! 

For there is a certain relaxation that comes 
when we know that we are not going to be 
held up to what we have said, that we shall 

1 This paper originally appeared in the Atlantic's Contributors' Club. 



THE WINE OF ANONYMITY 63 

escape the annoyance of being expected to be 
the kind of person who said it, whatever it 
may be. When we meet a man who has writ- 
ten things, we expect him to hve up to his 
signature. Usually he does n't, and then we 

grumble, "Is n't he the man who wrote 

? I thought so. Well, he doesn't look 



it, does he.^^" Probably he is tired of being 
expected to "look it," and does n't mean to, 
and is glad he does n't. 

In spite of Emerson, consistency is a hob- 
goblin. Most of us cannot help feeling that 
what we have said one day we are expected 
to abide by the next, and this makes us 
careful. We are brought up from youth to 
think before we speak, and so we do. We 
think, perhaps, three or four times, and when 
we have done our thinking we have begun to 
suspect that we are poor creatures anyway 
and might better not speak at all; which 
may be the case or it may not. Now the joy 
of anonymity is that we speak twice before 
we think. Perhaps — oh, mad and forbidden 
pleasure ! — we never think at all, we simply 
speak. The result is that we are absolutely 
spontaneous and happy. The wine of ano- 



64 THE WINE OF ANONYMITY 

nymity has loosened our tongues, and we 
prattle on in unchecked and artless fashion, 
and often more pleasantly than when sobered 
by the cold gray dawn of responsibility. 

It is probably the same thing at bottom 
that makes people so much better company 
at a masquerade than under any other cir- 
cumstances. In the circle of the black mask 
and the domino we have no name, no past, 
no future, no self to live up to or down to, 
and the mood that is uppermost need never 
impose itself upon a later mood. We can be 
spontaneous and genuine. No wonder we are 
good company! For on the whole our spon- 
taneous impulses are kindly and gay. We 
are almost always ready to love our fellow- 
men for an hour, if we are not thereby com- 
mitting ourselves to loving them for a life- 
time. 

It all seems to come back to the same thing 
— a reluctance to commit ourselves. It is 
easy enough to be advised, "Let him say 
what he thinks in hard words to-day, and 
to-morrow let him say what to-morrow thinks 
in hard words again." To the visionary and 
recluse this may be easy; but those of us who 



THE WINE OF ANONYMITY 65 

live close to our kind, who take color from 
them, who can never do anything without 
being conscious of an eflFect upon them which 
reacts in turn upon us — such vacillating and 
feeble chameleon-folk as these love to run to 
the cover of the anonymous, they wrap them- 
selves snugly in its mantle and mask, and 
then — ah, then they step out at ease, they 
hold the head high, they begin to say, ''I 
think," instead of "it is sometimes thought," 
and "I doubt," instead of "it appears doubt- 
ful." Ideas come to them with a rush. They 
have so much to say, now that the saying 
does not commit them to anything in particu- 
lar. They can confess their souls without 
being taken too seriously, or, indeed, being 
"taken" at all. They can berate the news- 
papers, and then settle down peacefully to 
the perusal of the latest murder news, and no 
one will taunt, "I thought you said you never 
read the papers." They can write an enco- 
mium on Milton, and then take down Sher- 
lock Holmes unchallenged by any one. They 
can hurl a philippic against magenta, and 
then choose a winter suit or the dining-room 
wall-paper of that color, without fear of 



66 THE WINE OF ANONYMITY 

reproach. Will any one say that this is not 
as wine to one who falters? 

Perhaps the fear of consequences keeps us 
from a few bad acts, but I am convinced that 
it also deters us from many good ones. It 
keeps us from being as disagreeable to people 
as we should sometimes hke to be, but it also 
prevents us from being as nice to them as we 
now and then have the impulse to be. 

I often think of this as I stand beside the 
track in the country and watch a train rush 
past. The engineer is usually leaning out of 
his window, I wave to him, he waves back, 
we smile in most friendly fashion, and the 
train flashes by. I am the better for the 
greeting, and I hope he is. Once I stood on a 
bridge and watched a slow freight creep along 
under me. The train men stood or lay on the 
top of the cars, and as they passed they tossed 
salutations up to me. I caught them all. It 
was great fun. But afterwards I reflected, 
what would have happened if that freight 
had suddenly stopped under the bridge, as 
freights sometimes do, or if the engine had 
blown out a cylinder or something, so that 
the intercourse of the moment threatened to 



THE WINE OF ANONYMITY 67 

be prolonged for an hour or two? I fancy all 
those genial men would have suddenly stif- 
fened into stolid automata, and I should have 
had a pressing engagement elsewhere. 

This is what keeps happening to us all the 
time in life. Our human intercourse is con- 
stantly being thwarted by our consciousness 
of consequences. It is especially the case when 
we are young. Young people feel that they 
can hardly have an intimate conversation 
without its ending in a promise to correspond 
or an invitation to visit. If we keep this atti- 
tude as we grow older, the consciousness that 
a moment's intimacy may entail so much 
makes us pause before taking the fateful 
plunge. How often do we draw back in a 
moment of expansion because we reflect, 
"Shall we feel the same way to-morrow, or 
next month.^" How many friendly impulses 
do we restrain because we are afraid the 
freight train may stop, and something more 
may be expected of us ! 

But sometimes as we grow older we come 
to realize that we have made in part our own 
burdens, and missed some rare pleasures. We 
discover that if we are honest and natural. 



68 THE WINE OF ANONYMITY 

intimate moments may prove to de not mill- /- 
stones but stars. Among my treasures of 
memory are those flashes of communion with 
others which have apparently lighted no 
lamp of friendship needing daily tending. It 
may have been with an acquaintance — who 
ever afterward remained, as before, an ac- 
quaintance merely — it may have been with 
a stranger, standing beside us for a moment 
in a crowded shop; or a seat-fellow in a rail- 
road train. The moment has come, we have 
recognized it, enjoyed it, and it has passed, 
but it is none the less prized. 

Perhaps if we had more courage we should 
shake off the tyranny of our own words and 
acts, and not need the mask and mantle to 
set us free. But so long as we are what we 
are, I cannot but think we should be happier, 
gayer, and no less good, if now and then we 
dropped our names and spoke without a 
thought of our own identity, if now and then 
we donned our mask and cloak and fared forth 
among our fellows, freed from the restraints 
of our own personality. 



The House and the Hill 

It is an old New England hillside. I say 
"old" because it usually feels old to me. Its 
patches of low huckleberry bushes, to be sure, 
bear every year new and shiny berries, the 
wild roses straying over its rocks bloom as 
fresh and sweet as if the whole hillside had 
been late-created, as though God had only 
thought of it last May. But those same berry 
patches have been here for generations, and 
the gnarled little rose-bushes which bear the 
tender blossoming shoots are, perhaps, as old 
as the giant chestnuts near them. The chest- 
nuts themselves are more obviously old, 
though they toss their creamy plumes of 
blossom each July afresh, and the rocks — 
the hillside, being truly of New England, is 
almost all rock — are older still. 

Now and then, walking slowly up one of 
the faint cow-paths that wind among huckle- 
berry and sumach, I have picked up an Indian 
arrow-head lying under a ledge as though 
dropped there but yesterday. It is as if a 



70 THE HOUSE AND THE HILL 

wave of the retreating past had swept up and 
licked about my feet, and I am set wondering 
about the past yet more remote — so remote 
that its waves can never stir me with even 
the tiniest left-over wave of reminiscence. 

I have always loved the hill. I felt that I 
knew it well, and through knowledge and 
aflfection had, in a sense, earned the right to 
call it mine. One day, I set up a little canvas 
house upon it — one room only, with win- 
dows on all sides. And when I entered it and 
looked out upon my hill I found that some- 
thing had happened. The hillside had become 
"outdoors." It had become this in a new 
way because I had created, in its midst, "in- 
doors." Hitherto, as I wandered here, or sat 
on its rocks, or lay on its thinly grassed sides, 
I had thought little about its aspects, I had 
never really held it from me to think about it 
at all; I had been a part of it, like the wasps 
among the berries or the bees among the 
roses. But now suddenly I found that I was 
holding it away from me. 

Perhaps I had lost something; certainly I 
had gained something. For, as I looked out 
through the wide, low windows, I found it 



THE HOUSE AND THE HILL 71 

more beautiful than it had ever been before 
— more vivid, more thrilHng. There was the 
western outlook — the hillside falling steeply 
away toward the gay green of the swamp 
meadow below, the lane winding at its foot 
up the opposite hill toward the huddle of 
gray roofs under dark maples. I had never 
noticed how the lane "composed" with roofs 
and maples and swamp. There was the 
southern — sloping in a tenderer curve, past 
wood-edges pushing in on both sides, toward 
the distance where a deep green hill rose into 
the sky. There was the eastern — a level 
pasture full of rocks and huckleberries and 
bounded by woods whose shadows baffled 
the eye. There was the northern — the rock 
ledges of silver-gray, rising rough against the 
blue, with deep-green cedars set stiffly about, 
and clumped thorn-bushes which in the au- 
tumn would be gay with berries. It seemed as 
if I had never really seen cedars until I saw 
them framed by the window of my house: 
delightful New England trees that they are, 
prim and uncompromising, rough and yet 
conventional, a little scratchy even to the 
eye? yet full of a real distinction in the com- 



72 THE HOUSE AND THE HILL 

pleteness of their individuality. And sensi- 
tive! Responsive in their color to every 
change of the sky or season, responsive in 
their delicate sea-weed-like tips to each 
breath of wind, and swaying to the bigger 
gusts with their whole stiff, spiring height. 

It is not the first time I have had this 
experience. Often, as I have walked along 
a country road, idly pleased with the world 
about me, I have passed an old barn, with 
great doors flung wide, front and back, so that 
one could look through them to the meadows 
behind. It is the same country I have been 
passing, — fields, bushes, fence-lines, a bit 
of hill and sky, — but the great doorways 
framing it in timbers and shadow create 
thereby a certain enhancement of its values, 
so that invariably, looking through, one gets 
one's impression with something added — a 
heightening of perception that is strangely 
arresting. 

What is it that the big barn doors do.^ They 
limit, of course, they cut a little piece out 
from the wholeness of things, they say to us, 
*' Never mind the rest, take just this, look at 
it in just this way — and now see how beauti- 



THE HOUSE AND THE HILL 73 

ful it is!" They play the artist to us for a 
moment, forcing upon us our point of view, 
selecting our subject, adjusting the lights, 
and — perhaps greatest service of all — sug- 
gesting to us, or rather, imposing upon us, 
that sense of distance that is so necessary a 
part of the aesthetic experience. 

This, too, is done for me by the broad, low 
windows of my little hillside house — this 
and something more. For the house gives 
zest to the hillside, as the hillside to the house, 
by its contrast of within and without. Out- 
doors means more to me by reason of having 
indoors too. 

These things have set me pondering — pon- 
dering upon the virtues of limitation and the 
powers that inhere in bonds. Parallels are 
dangerous things to play with, yet I am 
tempted to play with one now. We are in a 
generation that jeers at dogma and is impa- 
tient of creeds, yet may it not be that these 
have done for races what the open barn door 
does for the passer-by.^ Engulfed in the cos- 
mos, infinitesimal part of the great whole, we 
have no real awareness of it. But frame it in 
dogma, confine it in a creed, and it becomes 



74 THE HOUSE AND THE HILL 

ours in a certain vividness of apprehension 
born of the artificial Hmits we have set up. 
True, the race pays a price; it gives up all but 
the small moiety that can be viewed through 
that special creed. But the traveler, also, 
would not linger forever before the same barn 
door. He passes on, enriched. And so the 
races have passed on from creed to creed, and 
in each have found, in some sort, both riches 
and poverty, enlightenment and ignorance. 

It is true with all thought, all feeling, the 
entire circle of experience. As soon as we 
define, as soon as we express, we gain some- 
thing, though we perhaps also give up some- 
thing. In order to achieve, we must forego. 
No one, I fancy, ever wrote a poem or painted 
a picture without being aware, at least dimly, 
of a vast something that he was giving up. 
When artists feel this very keenly, struggling 
against it, striving for the gain without the 
loss, we sometimes perceive it and call them 
symbolists. But for us there is no loss, only 
great gain. For us, all great poems, all pic- 
tures, all works of art, are as great doors 
flung wide, as windows looking north or east 
or south or west, framing some part of the 



THE HOUSE AND THE HILL 75 

beauty of the world which without them we 
should never so deeply perceive. 

But there is a further parallel which I 
would fain play with. My little house, giving 
me my center of indoors from which, or even 
because of which, to enjoy the widening 
circles of outdoors — it is a symbol to me 
of my own individuality. The supreme joy, 
some say, is to lose one's self in the infinite. 
Perhaps, but let us not forget that there 
would be no point to this if we had not first 
a self to lose. It is a joy to me to gaze out of 
my windows, to go out of my door and enter 
into the great sea of outdoors that surges up 
even to the canvas walls of my little house. 
But these walls are what give its own color to 
my joy. So it is, too, with the barriers of my- 
self. I should be loath to let them down, 
slight though they seem, and poor though that 
within may prove when scanned for its own 
static values. For how can we appreciate 
anything save through differences^ And what 
can the infinite be to me unless I can approach 
it from something that is not infinite .^^ 

It is idle to reason about such things, yet 
still I play with my childish symbols. I even 



76 THE HOUSE AND THE HILL 

picture myself, a tiny house, flying through 
the Cosmos — so small, so unimportant, yet 
so persistently and joyously finite, so inalien- 
ably and joyously possessed of its own in- 
doorness, in the midst of that wide outdoors. 
It is a presumptuous fancy, yet when I frown 
upon it, it only smiles back at me — the 
fancy that without this element even the 
hillsides of Nirvana might lack piquancy, — 
that even upon their limitless reaches I must 
needs maintain the walls, frail but valiant, of 
my own self. 



Humor and the Heroine 

I HAVE of late been mingling afresh with the 
heroines of our greater English fiction, hold- 
ing converse with this lady, sitting a while 
beside that, sending a word or a smile to 
another and another, renewing old intimacies 
with many. They are a fair and gallant com- 
pany, and it is good to be with them. They 
are wise and sweet, passionate, strong and 
brave, beautiful almost always, good on the 
whole, and, without fail, interesting. Yet I 
felt the lack of one last grace — a sense of 
humor. Their families often have it, their 
servants sometimes, their authors almost al- 
ways have it, but the ladies themselves, they 
have it not. 

There was Maggie Tulliver: in the heart 
of a richly humorous society, wherein her 
own father and mother and aunts were the 
shining luminaries, she saw none of the hu- 
mor, she only felt the pain — for it is the light 
touch that tickles, the heavy impact hurts or 
stuns. And so, where another nature might 



78 HUMOR AND THE HEROINE 

have smiled at the narrowness and the ig- 
norance and the intolerance, her spirit was 
crushed by it, or driven to desperate rebel- 
lion. 

And Dorothea! If her grave gray eyes 
could have been lighted by a gleam of humor, 
in how different an aspect would the world 
around her have presented itself to her; she 
might have regarded Sir James with less im- 
patience and Casaubon with less veneration, 
she would probably have been saved from 
being his wife, and would have missed the 
wisdom and the pain which that experience 
brought to her. She would have forfeited the 
joy of cherishing certain ideals, but would 
have been spared the pain of seeing them 
shattered. Possibly, too, she would have lost 
her power of appealing to some natures, as 
well as her desire to do so — for Mr. Cad- 
wallader, it will be remembered, who was 
richly endowed with the humorous sense, felt 
no call to reform the world. Surely, even the 
faintest light of humor on her face would have 
repelled Rosamond Vincy in a critical mo- 
ment, and checked her impulse of confidence. 
But she would have been happier, perhaps 



HUMOR AND THE HEROINE 79 

saner, and, who knows, she might even have 
built better houses for the poor. 

Thackeray's ladies are of another sort, yet 
humor sits not upon their brows. From Bea- 
trix Esmond there dart now and then flash- 
ing sword-blades of cynicism, murderous 
rather than lambent. Becky's is Mephisto- 
phelian wit that blasts, while poor little 
Amelia has no wit of any sort, barely head 
enough to carry her through the plainer is- 
sues of life, and that not without bungling. 
Ethel Newcome, indeed, might under better 
nurture have sent out a light of humor, but it 
was turned to flashes of sardonic wit aimed at 
a social order that she scorned yet bowed to. 

Scott's damsels have not even these latent 
powers. Gay or stately, serene or passionate, 
they are at one in this. As Chaucer's nun 
rides demure and undiscerning in the road- 
side company whose humorous aspects Chau- 
cer himself so keenly enjoyed, so these ladies 
move in a world of chivalry and of jollity, 
touched by emotions of pity and of prudery, 
of love and of alarm, but never touched by 
humor. 

The Bronte novels are without even mod- 



80 HUMOR AND THE HEROINE 

erately cheerful accessories — not an expan- 
sive butler, a relaxed monk, or a jesting 
grave-digger — to mitigate the nightmare de- 
pression of their down-trodden though fitfully 
remonstrant heroines, bullied along by their 
fierce or sullen heroes. 

In contemporary fiction there is no better 
tale to tell. Mrs. Ward has sent out, one after 
another, a series of strenuous dames, from the 
Katharine of ''Robert Elsmere," with her 
austere and chilling virtue, to Lady Rose's 
daughter, with less virtue and more charm, 
who, if she had been endowed with humorous 
insight, could better have endured her servi- 
tude to so splendid a mark for the comic spirit 
as Lady Henry. Miss Wilkins's young wo- 
men pass before us, a pathetic company, with 
faces worn though sweet, and spirits repressed 
though brave. The brilliant ladies of our 
myriad "historical" romances are content to 
be brilKant merely in face and robing and in 
the deeds of their lovers; they are not so much 
great in themselves as the occasion of great- 
ness in others. 

Scanning the fair company of heroines, I 
have indeed found a few upon whose faces 



HUMOR AND THE HEROINE 81 

plays a light of real humor, but these excep- 
tions may be counted on one's fingers. There 
is Meredith's Diana, there is his Clara Mid- 
dleton, perplexed, ensnared, yet with eyes in 
whose depths lurk the dancing imps that her 
creator himself invoked to his aid. They 
helped her to her final escape from the Mon- 
ster, goading her and jeering at her by turns 
as she fluttered under his hand, but always, 
though with flickering lights, exhibiting to her 
humorous sense the comic aspects of that 
same Monster. Stevenson, who made few 
women, made one, Barbara Graham, in whose 
eyes gleams the delicious mockery that is both 
wise and kind. Jane Austen, herself endowed 
with an exquisite perception of the hiunor in 
the society about her, vouchsafed the same 
gift of vision to the most charming of her 
heroines, Elizabeth Bennett. With dancing 
eyes Elizabeth observes them all, — her 
family, her neighbors, her suitor the unpar- 
alleled Mr. Collins, her lover the formidable 
Mr. Darcy, and his aunt the overpowering 
Lady de Burgh. She girds at them with her 
nimble tongue, whose wit, a trifle too sharp- 
edged at first, is softened by sorrow and fail- 



82 HUMOE AND THE HEROINE 

ure until its gayety is only kind. Sweet girl ! 
If Maggie Tulliver could but have looked on 
her world as Elizabeth regarded hers ! A few 
flicks from Elizabeth's tongue, the sort that 
proved so beneficial to the high-and-mighty 
Darcy, would have done Tom Tulliver 
worlds of good. But Maggie's weapons were 
of a different fashion, and their shafts always 
rebounded to wound the sender. Curious, is 
it not, that with George Eliot's own strong 
sense for the humor of life, her heroines — or 
heroes either, for that matter (consider 
Daniel Deronda and Felix Holt and Adam 
Bede!) — should have been so utterly devoid 
of it. One exception there is, in Esther Lyon, 
the dainty and difficult, who, but for a touch 
of querulousness, belongs rather in Miss 
Austen's circle and might have been a more 
satisfying friend to Elizabeth Bennett than 
any she possessed. 

Yet if we>leave the novelists and turn to the 
master playwright, we find gayety enough. 
There is Rosalind, the brave and merry- 
hearted, taking her life's misfortunes in both 
hands and turning them first to jest and then 
to joy. There is Viola, breathing a delicate 



HUMOR AND THE HEROINE 83 

fragrance of humor where she passes. There 
is Portia, with a gleam in her eye as she enters 
in her legal vestments, the gleam kindling in- 
to a humorous justice toward the Jew and a 
humorous jest toward the Christian. There is 
Beatrice the royal-hearted, with her sound, 
true laughter and her sound, true scorn, — a 
queenly heroine, tragedy draws back before 
her tread, she masters it in its beginning. 

Yes, from Rosalind, from Beatrice tragedy 
falls away. And is this the reason why our 
heroines for the most part know not humor .^^ 
Is it that its possession gives one a kind of 
armor against adversity, an immunity from 
attack, a mastery of the world in place of sub- 
jection to it.^ Perhaps. There are those who 
have not this mastery, who are born to be 
hurt, to be flung down, to be conquered or to 
conquer only through panting struggle; and 
these are they the artist seeks, on the watch 
always for the shock of conflict, the clash of 
nerves and hearts. The "interesting" tem- 
perament is the passionate, the impetuous, 
not the temperate and controlled. Humor 
implies a certain remoteness, aloofness, which 
quenches the ardor of the adventure. It im- 



84 HUMOR AND THE HEROINE 

plies balance, sense of proportion, of values, 
and this brings the poise and control not 
shared by those who struggle for life in mid- 
stream. Yet it is the struggle for life that the 
artist seeks to depict and his public yearns to 
witness. 

Must it be so.^ Would there not be some- 
thing yet more poignant in struggle and suffer- 
ing, if it were accompanied, illuminated by a 
humorous sense, turned inward to accent the 
folly of it sll? Lear's fool seems to some of us 
more pathetic than his master by virtue of this 
very consciousness, and the appeal of Cyr- 
ano de Bergerac is accentuated by the lurk- 
ing smile of the sufferer as he regards him- 
self. But who will create for us such a figure? 
From the novelists there is, as we have seen, 
little to expect. Among the poet-dramatists, 
whether we accept the leadership of Ibsen 
or Maeterlinck or D'Annunzio or Sardou or 
Phillips, there is scarcely a rift in the cloud 
of conscious and conscientious seriousness. 
Obviously, we must wait. 



The Humor-Fetish 

In every period and every land people have 
had their pet virtues. The Athenians adored 
wit, and the Spartans health; the Hebrews, 
at least retrospectively, honored the gift of 
prophecy; the Romans the virtue of self- 
control, the Quakers the virtue of peace- 
ableness. Pioneers, the world over, worship 
bravery and resourcefulness — the virtues of 
aggression; settled societies appreciate fair- 
mindedness and rectitude — the virtues of 
restraint; aristocracies affect the virtues of 
conformity. 

All virtues are good, though perhaps none 
of them so superlatively and exclusively good 
as each has at some time been deemed. But 
just now it would seem that in the general 
estimation they are all about to yield preced- 
ence to one which is, comparatively speaking, 
a new-comer, usually known as the Sense of 
Humor. 

Not but that men have always laughed. 
But their laughter was grounded in brutality, 



86 THE HUMOR-FETISH 

and it was long before it took on any signifi- 
cance that we should now call humorous. The 
Athenians, to be sure, had attained humor, 
but later Europeans, in this respect as in 
many others, did not climb from their shoul- 
ders; they had to begin at the bottom, just 
as if Aristophanes had never made the very 
heavens rock with laughter. And it was a 
long way up from the half-Latinized Goth 
and Celt to Shakespeare and Moliere and 
Lamb and Meredith. 

No wonder that we should be dazzled by a 
virtue for all practical purposes only a few 
centuries old, and still growing. But we ought 
not to be dazzled too long, and it really seems 
as if this new virtue were becoming some- 
thing of a fetish. A young man said gravely 
the other day, '' One can't get to heaven with- 
out a sense of humor, you know." A gentle- 
man writes from England to the editors of an 
American school paper to inquire into the 
status of the sense of humor among American 
boys, as compared with English. The word 
"humor" is on every one's lips. Humor is the 
one thing needful. We are warned against 
choosing friends who lack it; and as for mar- 



THE HUMOR-FETISH 87 

riage, if both parties do not possess it the 
altar is but a prelude to the divorce court, if 
not to suicide. If any man fail of success in 
any way, we are told that it is because he 
lacks humor; if he is dissatisfied with existing 
conditions, this accounts for it. Nearly every 
human vagary, from eccentricities in dress to 
curious tastes in the naming of children, is 
ascribed to the absence or inadequacy of this 
one virtue. Everything, from dinner-parties 
to matrimony, must be ordered with a view to 
this test. 

Now, humor is a pleasant thing, and a good 
thing; but perhaps it is being a little overdone, 
and overdone with a touch of priggery and 
a touch of stupidity. The priggery lies in 
the assumption, always apparent, that we, 
the speaker and his companions, possess this 
jewel, this last gift, and we are filled with a 
self-congratulatory glow as we consider those 
poor unfortimates who are not thus endowed. 
It is the Pharisee hugging himseK for his own 
virtues, though the particular virtue chosen 
is one which was probably not valued by the 
original Pharisee. I know of nothing more 
complete than the arrogance of the man who 



88 THE HUMOR-FETISH 

laughs at a joke towards the man who does 
not — an arrogance so absolute, indeed, that 
its only manifestation is often a tolerant and 
amused pity. As a people, we Americans 
have assumed for ourselves the position of 
those who laugh, with the other nations of 
the world falling into line behind us, according 
to their respective capacity in this one matter. 
But some of us who have chanced to encoun- 
ter the jocular American abroad must have 
wished that other virtues than humor had 
been a little more emphasized in his home 
circle. 

The touch of stupidity lies in the assump- 
tion that the sense of humor is a simple char- 
acteristic, like blueness of eyes, or a defin- 
ite possession, like pennies, that people may 
have or not have, in varying and ascertain- 
able quantities. Indeed, whenever we begin 
to sort people out into classes according to 
their characteristics, we usually get into 
trouble. And of all unhelpful classifications, 
the worst is this one based on the possession 
of a sense of humor. It is almost as unman- 
ageable as the one based on goodness and 
badness, so called, which has at least the 



THE HUMOR-FETISH 89 

sanction of tradition, though it has led to ht- 
tle but bewilderment. We all know Aueassin's 
frank comments on the personnel of Heaven, 
as thus determined; and many before and 
since his time have felt as he did. But if the 
sense of humor, instead of goodness, is to 
be made the condition of entrance, the society 
there will be different indeed, but perhaps 
even queerer. Thersites and Henry VIII will 
get in, but Milton and Seneca will not. Lin- 
coln will be safe, to be sure, and Hawthorne 
may slip past the gate unchallenged, but 
hardly Emerson. For Cromwell and Napo- 
leon, for Coleridge and John Stuart Mill, 
there will be no hope. And as for those others 
whom we know even better than these — Ros- 
alind and Hamlet and Beatrice and Mercu- 
tio — it will be well with them; but Perdita 
and Isabella and Miranda must remain out- 
side with Malvolio and Polonius, although it 
may comfort them to find Hector and Achilles 
and Prospero and Horatio in their company. 
The trouble all comes from trying to base 
any classification at all on so elusive a quality 
as this so-called sense of humor. For it is not 
all one thing, or even degrees of one thing. It 



90 THE HUMOR-FETISH 

is so protean a quality, so dependent for its 
value upon a vast number of delicate adjust- 
ments among other qualities of a person's na- 
ture, that while it continually invites analy- 
sis, it continually eludes definition. 

There are as many kinds of humor as there 
are kinds of people, and the important ques- 
tion is, not whether any one possesses it, but 
what kind he possesses. Better none at all 
than a sort that does not chance to harmon- 
ize with our own. George Eliot points out 
somewhere that one of the hardest tests of 
friendship is a difference of taste in jokes. 
Why, then, are people thus reckless in invok- 
ing a quality so little understood and so apt 
to lead to difficulties? Every one knows that 
there is nothing more dangerous than an es- 
caped virtue, but if we are not careful this one 
will have given us the sUp and, in common 
phrase, "be all over the shop." Indeed, it 
sometimes seems as if this had already hap- 
pened, if one may judge from our newspapers, 
our magazines, our conversation, and the de- 
meanor of our countrymen abroad. Humor is 
considered the one thing needful, and few 
pause to ask, What sort of humor? Yet the 



THE HUMOR-FETISH 91 

time may come when we shall be so cloyed 
with it that we may beg to be spared any sort. 
Already it is a relief now and then to find a 
person who is habitually serious, whose con- 
versation is not continually "lighted up" by 
the humorous point of view. Such people, we 
hear, are not good to Uve with. What a curi- 
ous blunder! I know such a person, one of the 
loveliest 1 have ever had the good fortune to 
meet, and of humor — humor of any sort — 
she has not a shadow — or shall we say a 
flicker? She smiles often, but from pure kind- 
ness, not from amusement. She laughs when 
her friends laugh, but only through sym- 
pathy with them. She has sweet, grave eyes, 
and a mouth gentle and firm and motherly, 
and her voice is like the touch of a quiet hand. 
She has dignity without condescension, and 
a love for all things, both great and small, 
that is never found wanting. Not good to 
live with? Those whose household she blesses 
give thanks every hour of the day, though 
not always consciously, for the boon of her 
presence. 

Not get to Heaven without a sense of hu- 
mor? Like Aucassin, we are puzzled. But we 



92 THE HUMOR-FETISH 

will not be so defiant as he, and choose to 
stay out. We will rather hope that there is 
some mistake. Perhaps this ruling is not final. 
Perhaps Heaven will reconsider. 



In the Matter of "Faith " 

Readers of the July "Atlantic" must have 
found excellent entertainment in Mr. Root's 
little essay on "The Age of Faith." His sub- 
ject is one that we are always interested in — 
the question of the real resemblances between 
seemingly contrasted periods of human his- 
tory. By a series of ingenious comparisons, 
he leaves us with the impression that in spite 
of superficial differences — of language, of 
manners, of interests — one age is not so very 
diflferent from another. The "Age of Reason" 
was not very reasonable after all, the French 
Revolution differed "only in externals" from 
the Crusades of old, and the "Ages of Faith," 
far from being past, find their counterpart in 
the age to which we now belong. It is very 
ingenious, very amusing, and almost convinc- 
ing. 

Almost, but. not quite. Perhaps, where we 
have been so well amused, we ought not to 
ask to be convinced. Yet there is a serious 
aspect to this question — so serious that we 



94 IN THE MATTER OF FAITH 

cannot bring ourselves to set it aside. For the 
very essence of human history is here at issue, 
the essence of human life. And there are 
some of us, perhaps many, to whom Bergson 
comes as spokesman for all our deepest in- 
stincts when he insists that life is essentially 
change, that for conscious life, duration 
means unfolding, that each experience in- 
volves the total of preceding experience, and 
that therefore life, bearing along with it the 
cumulative values of its own past, can never, 
in any real sense, repeat itself. 

It is this that makes us restive, even while 
we smile in genuine pleasiu-e at Mr. Root's 
cleverness. {There must, we feel, be some- 
thing wrong with his argument. 

If there is, it lies in his use of a few key- 
words — words like Faith, Evidence, and the 
Unseen. 

We live, he says, as truly in an age of faith 
as did our ancestors of Mediaeval Europe. 
Only, whereas their faith fastened itself upon 
God, and the angels, and the holy relics of the 
saints, ours concerns itself with other things 
equally unseen, in whose truth we believe, 
just as the truth of those was once believed 



IN THE MATTER OF FAITH 95 

in, on the authority of others, on the most 
incomplete evidence, or on no evidence at all. 
He instances our "faith" in the doctrine of 
evolution, in the revolution of the earth upon 
its axis, and in the existence of specific bac- 
teria of disease. 

Now it is true that the word "faith" may 
be used to denote men's belief in these things, 
and it is also true that the same word has been 
used to denote men's belief in God and the 
angels and the saints' relics. But is it true 
that "faith" is really the same word in both 
sets of cases? To be sure, in both the word 
implies belief in something not immediately 
obvious to the senses; in both it implies a 
certain confidence in the authority of some 
one else. But at this point the parallel ends. 
Indeed, before this point. For the phrase 
"confidence in authority" may be used to 
cover many different things, and in this case 
it is so used. The confidence that men once 
felt in the authority of their priests is still 
to some extent paralleled in the confidence 
which we now feel in our spiritual leaders, 
whether we call them priests or not; but the 
confidence which we feel in the testimony of 



96 IN THE MATTER OF FAITH 

men like Darwin is something different — 
neither more nor less valuable, it may be, 
neither more nor less sure, but resting on a 
different basis. That it is possible to speak of 
both things under one name is merely an in- 
stance of the inaccuracy of language. A word 
is not a bullet, that will split a hair and leave 
the hair beside it untouched. It is more like a 
charge of fine shot, that hits scatteringly over 
the whole barn door. 

Similarly, as he uses it, the word "faith" 
covers many different states of feeling, which 
might be somewhat more particularly dis- 
criminated in the words certitude, faith, 
confidence, and credulity. Moreover, these 
states are not completely different. They are 
not marked off from one another by stiff 
fencing; they overlap, they merge into one 
another. 

If then we agree to let "faith" stand for all 
these mental states,f we may very truly say 
that our own age, as well as other preceding 
ones, is an age of faith. But thus understood, 
this means very little. It goes without saying. 
For the real question is, what in different 
ages has been the relative importance, or 



m THE MATTER OF FAITH 97 

prevalence, of these various states of mind. 
Can we cheek off our certitude against their 
certitude, our credulity against their cre- 
dulity, and so on? If so, the two ages are 
so far really alike. Or will an uncanceled 
residue remain, on one side or the other? If 
so, the two ages differ in this respect by just 
so much. 

Now, of course, no such canceling process 
can be really applied, though some rough 
appraisals might be made if one went to 
work in the right way. But still less can the 
canceling process be carried out between un- 
like states; we cannot check off faith against 
credulity, certitude against confidence. Yet 
this is exactly what Mr. Root does: for ex- 
ample, he parallels our belief in disease- 
germs with the mediseval belief in foul fiends. 
Yet the belief in fiends is clearly a case of 
credulity, the belief in disease-producing bac- 
teria is, in spite of errors and exaggerations 
and all manner of mistakes in its details, 
well on the road toward certitude. The fact 
that the germs are, for most of us, unseen, 
and the fiends were also unseen, is a mere ac- 
cidental parallelism of phrasing. 



98 IN THE MATTER OF FAITH 

The logical error here is plain enough. Dis- 
similars cannot be thus compared. But per- 
haps even similars are not really such. Per- 
haps our certitude is not their certitude, our 
doubt their doubt. 

For example: it may be said, that to the 
mind of the Middle Ages nothing appeared 
impossible. The modern thinker, we some- 
times hear it remarked, is beginning also to 
say, "Nothing is impossible." But does this 
mean that we have swung back to the earlier 
attitude? Not at all. To assume that the 
tolerance of the modern thinker for "the im- 
possible," springing from knowledge, — even 
knowledge of his own vast ignorance, — is 
the same thing as the tolerance of the Middle 
Ages for the impossible, springing from sheer 
ignorance and poor method — to do this would 
be to confuse things as unlike as the " sleep " of 
a spinning top and the stillness of a dead one. 

And if our attitude toward the great realm 
of the uncertain and the unknown is a diflfer- 
ent thing from the state of mind in former 
times, though it may be described in similar 
terms, so also is our knowledge of the certain 
and the known a different thing from the 



IN THE MATTER OF FAITH 99 

knowledge of earlier men. The thirteenth- 
century man felt certain, because of the evi- 
dence of his senses, that the sun revolved 
round the earth. We feel certain, in spite of 
this evidence of the senses, but on account of 
other evidence, also coming to us ultimately 
through the senses, that the earth moves 
round the sun. But no one will seriously main- 
tain that our certitude and his certitude are 
the same in quality. There have been, par- 
ticularly since Bacon's time, changes in the 
manner of our thinking, both in basis and 
method, which are gradually changing the 
quality of belief of every kind. The attitude 
of mind which made it possible for really good 
thinkers to say, " I doubt, therefore I beheve,'* 
is obsolescent, if not obsolete. And if faith 
is, perhaps, changing, religion is certainly 
changing still more. If there really is, as Mr. 
Root suggests, a "religion of evolution," — 
and the phrase seems a very doubtful one, — 
this means, not that religion is still the same 
only with its lingo altered, but that men are 
making for themselves a new religion to meet 
their new needs. Whether it does or does not 
meet these needs is beside the question. 



100 IN THE MATTER OF FAITH 

As usual, it comes down to a question of 
the meaning of terms. All through Mr. 
Root's article he seems to be indulging in a 
kind of tournament of language, in which 
the game is to see how many different ideas 
you can spear with the same word. The 
word "unseen" is a wonder in this sort of con- 
test. Bacteria are unseen, angels are unseen, 
demons are unseen, phagocytes are unseen, 
the ice age is unseen, God is unseen. There- 
fore they are all of a piece, — bacteria, angels, 
demons, phagocytes, the ice age and God, — 
spitted on the same lance and brandished be- 
fore our somewhat astonished eyes. 

And his best lance of all is Faith. Thrusting 
to right and left, he impales upon its shaft all 
manner of things — faith in scientists, faith 
in God, faith in doctors and health oflScers, 
faith in witches, faith in priests and in astrol- 
ogers and medicine-men, faith in astronomi- 
cal laws. 

Success to such tilting! It is fim to watch, 
and does no harm so long as we remember 
that it is only a game. But suppose we forgot 
this, suppose we began to think that these 
strange spear-mates of the tilting were really 



IN THE MATTER OF FAITH 101 

mates? That would, perhaps, be something 
of a pity, because it would mean the throwing 
away of such precision of thinking as we have 
yet attained, which is Uttle enough. 

It is just this lack of precise thinking, 
— this habit of comfortable believing that 
things on the whole are pretty much as they 
have always been, and will continue pretty 
much the same forever, — that is at the root 
of a good many of our troubles. It is, for ex- 
ample, what helps some of us to believe that 
there is no church problem, and no marriage 
problem, — that in these realms no real 
changes have occurred, and therefore no new 
adjustments are required. 

This is the only excuse for any protest 
against so dehghtful a bit of entertainment 
as is furnished us in the little article in ques- 
tion. Perhaps, however, we have a private 
and particular grievance, in the fact that the 
treatment of "faith" seems to spoil the word 
for us. We have always thought of it as " the 
substance of things hoped for, the evidence of 
things not seen." And it has often appeared 
to us that "faith" in this sense is growing 
stronger and keener because more fully aware 



102 IN THE MATTER OF FAITH 

of its own realm and its own power. We 
know, as never before, the diflference between 
the things hoped for and the things possessed. 
We know, as never before, the diflference be- 
tween the things that are seen — whether 
with the mind's eye or the body's is imma- 
terial — and the things that are not seen. 
For this reason, and not at all for those given 
by Mr. Root, we might be willing to call our 
own age an age of faith. But if faith must be 
allowed to mean belief in bacteria and in 
gravity and in evolution — very well. We 
must give up the word to these uses and find 
another to mean what we have thus far 
meant by faith — faith in the power of love, 
faith in all the things of the spirit. 

And yet — St. Paul's EngUsh translators 
have held the field a long time. Would it not 
be courteous to let them keep their word, and 
find another for bacteria and phagocytes.'^ 



'*In Their Season 



99 



There is a scene in Marlowe's "Doctor 
Faustus" in which the great doctor, wishing 
to show his power, asks a duchess what 
dainty she most desires. It being then mid- 
winter, she considerately chooses "a dish of 
ripe grapes." Nothing daunted, Faustus pro- 
duces the grapes, and the duke exclaims," Be- 
lieve me. Master Doctor, this makes me to 
wonder above the rest, that being in the dead 
time of winter, and in the month of January, 
how you should come by these grapes," while 
the delighted duchess chimes in, "Believe 
me, Master Doctor, they be the best grapes 
that e'er I tasted in my life before." 

The passage often comes to my mind as I 
glance at the show windows of some "high- 
class" grocery, and reahze that if the play 
were rewritten strictly up to date Faustus 
would have to produce something much more 
spectacular than grapes in January in order 
to rouse even a passing comment. 

I wish it were not so. Not that I begrudge 



104 IN THEIR SEASON 

the duchess her grapes, or Faustus his chance 
to show off. They meant no harm. But 
against the tendency that they represent I 
protest. "That they should bring forth their 
fruits in due season." This embodies an older 
idea, and to my mind a better one. I am not 
prepared to defend everything in the original 
plan of the world — many things have been 
and many things can be improved. But this 
part of the arrangement always seemed to 
me, in its main outlines, very good. 

"In their season." That, to my mind, 
means strawberries in June and blueberries 
in July and huckleberries in August. And 
when I encounter strawberries in January, 
blueberries in March, and raspberries in De- 
cember I feel deeply irritated. I do not want 
all my seasons jogging my elbow at once. 
It makes me think of a certain sort of board- 
ing-house table, under "liberal" manage- 
ment, where every day one is given six differ- 
ent vegetables, and mostly the same six. Far 
better one each day for;six days, and a chance 
between to forget it. 

I like my spring mud in March, my roses 
in June, my apples in September, my sleet 



IN THEIR SEASON 105 

and snow in January — all things in their own 
place. The time for winter seems to me to 
be the winter-time, and spring-time, I am 
profoundly convinced, is the time for spring. 
For one of the most joyous things about 
spring is that it comes after winter. Cayenne 
on the tongue, it is said, gives zest to cham- 
pagne. Reversing the temperatures, winter 
gives zest to spring. What can it mean, I 
wonder, to countries who do not have to 
tussle through a New England winter? And, 
conversely, should we enjoy the coziness and 
intimacy of winter if we had not had the great, 
wide summer to play in first .^ 

Children understand these matters. Look 
how they take their sports! When the winds 
of March bluster round our house-corners, it 
is the time for kites — kites they must have. 
The cloud-swept skies are full of them — 
green diamond kites, red and yellow Japan- 
ese kites, big modern box kites, old-fashioned 
brown paper kites with long waggling tails, 
sensitively responsive to every stimulus. For 
a brief season they live overhead, riding still 
and calm, or performing wild antics, accord- 
ing to the wind or their own inherent nature. 



106 IN THEIR SEASON 

Then their time is past, leaving its traces only 
in the sorry remnants that nest in the tree- 
tops or dangle forlornly from the telegraph 
wires. And after them comes marbles — or 
is it jack-stones? and then tops, and then 
roller-skates, and then — ? but this is no 
child's almanac; I may have the series all 
wrong, but I have digested the principle, and 
I should never expect to find a well-regulated 
child using jack-stones in the top season, or 
spinning tops in kite time. 

It is not so with us older people. And I 
have been as bad as any. There was a time 
when I thought it a rather clever thing to 
take spring by violence. I brought out pussy- 
willows in December — it is a common enough 
offense. And when they had gone through 
all their stages, from silver kitten-paws to 
pink kitten-noses, then to fluffy yellow or 
green caterpillars, and finally had shed all 
these and sent out long pale shoots and 
masses of white roots, I was embarrassed 
to know what to do with them. I could 
not throw live green things like that out in 
January snowdrifts. I could not plant them, 
I did not want to keep them in a jar until 



IN THEIR SEASON 107 

April. Finally I threw them in the fire and 
left the room quickly. 

I tried again with dogwood. I picked it in 
January, and by the end of February it was 
in blossom. It was beautiful, of course, and 
I was rather proud — I don't know whether 
my enjoyment of the results came more from 
love of beauty or from pride. But after the 
blossoms had shriveled, there were still 
March and April. Whenever I passed a dog- 
wood tree, I felt, somehow, uncomfortable. I 
had had my dogwood. These little dabs at 
spring simply took the edge ofiE, like a nap 
just before bedtime. 

This, I fancy, is almost always true. There 
is no greater pleasure than that of watching 
the seasons — any season, whether of vege- 
tables or of people — observe their own times 
and develop their own qualities. Moreover, 
in the opposite habit, the habit that Faustus 
exemplified and most of our modern institu- 
tions encourage, there lurks a real danger. It 
is the danger that things will be valued, not 
in proportion to their real goodness or charm, 
but in proportion to the difficulty of obtain- 
ing them. Faustus's grapes had a certain 



108 IN THEIR SEASON 

natural value as grapes, but they had also an 
artificial value as grapes in January. In his 
case this meant, the Devil. In our more mod- 
ern situation, it means a hothouse or a cold- 
storage plant, and the establishment that 
goes with it; or it means the equivalent of this 
in money — which we may or may not call 
the Devil, according to the way we happen to 
look at such matters. 

Faustus was proud of his Devil, and we are 
proud of our hothouses or their equivalent, 
and in the meantime the goodness of grapes 
as grapes is apt to become a secondary matter 
— not, perhaps, to the duchess, who merely 
ate the grapes, but to Faustus. He was not 
above showing off, neither was the Devil, 
neither are any of us, though we are usually 
above seeming to show off, having lost the 
naivete of the old doctor and his Mephisto; 
and this desire blurs our appreciation of 
grapes as grapes, and of other things. It may, 
indeed, carry us so far that we shall find 
ourselves cherishing and exhibiting ugliness, 
because it is hard to get, and growing in- 
different to any beauty that is not rare. 

It is not only the fruits and vegetables that 



IN THEIR SEASON 109 

are getting mixed up. The seasons in people's 
lives seem to be losing some of their individ- 
ual character, so that we never know just 
what we are going to get. In some ways this 
is a gain. For example, the definite putting 
away of childish things was not an un- 
alloyed good. The complete shutting-off of 
the child from the confidence of the adult, the 
complete alienation of the adult from the in- 
terests of the youth, these are not habits to 
cling to. And yet it is a fact that life ought to 
bring us its various experiences with a certain 
regard to their seasonableness, and when we 
see httle children going to "problem-plays," 
and grown-ups spending their mornings over 
cards and their evenings over picture-puzzles, 
one is tempted to think that something is 
wrong. Jaques would have to revise his sum- 
mary of the seven ages of man, and still more 
of woman, rather thoroughly to make it pass 
muster now. There seems to be very little 
springtime in the lives of to-day; it is mostly 
summer and Indian summer, while winter — 
quiet, hospitable, intimate, stay-at-home win- 
ter — is getting left out entirely. 
If we don't look out, we shall infect Nature. 



110 IN THEIR SEASON 

She is a sensitive creature, highly "suggest- 
ible," as the psychologists put it.. Some one 
has maintained that it was purely at the sug- 
gestion of the impressionists that she perpe- 
trated London fogs and purple cabbages. She 
may do other things. There is no telling what 
she may not do. In imagination I look out 
upon a world where babes in tailor-made suits 
play bridge through snow-bound July eve- 
nings, where old ladies in pinafores skip about 
picking daisies in December. But let us not 
too wildly anticipate! Let us bring ourselves 
up sharply before it is too late. Let us con- 
sider whether we do not, after all, get the 
most out of things, whether they be grapes or 
kites or snowstorms or enthusiasm, by taking 
them in their season. 



Manners and the Puritan 

Mr. Ell wood Hendrick's article, "We Are 
so Young," which appeared in the May 
"Atlantic," will bring satisfaction and re- 
freshment to many of us, who have long felt 
as he does on the subject of American man- 
ners. 

The question, as he raises it, is not whether 
American manners are bad, but whether, if 
they are bad, we can allow the "older" na- 
tions to excuse us on the ground of our 
"youth." 

Many of us must agree heartily with Mr. 
Hendrick in his protest against the accept- 
ance of this excuse. We may go even further, 
and maintain that we cannot afford to claim 
or accept exemption from world-standards of 
manners on any ground whatever. If, how- 
ever, we are seeking, not excuses but reasons, 
I am inclined to think that, at least as far as 
New England, and those sections of the coun- 
try which derive from New England, are con- 
cerned, we have paid too Uttle attention to 



112 MANNERS AND THE PURITAN 

the possible effect on manners of a Puritan 
tradition. 

The Puritan conscience and other things 
about the Puritans have, perhaps, been a 
httle overemphasized, but it is, I hope, not 
altogether fanciful to suggest that the habits 
of mind which fostered the Puritan reaction 
and which were in turn fostered by it, are not 
of a sort which would blossom and bear fruit 
in comeHness of manner and of phrase. 

For this was a reaction from what? From 
what seemed to them empty rituahsm, with 
its attendant evils of worldHness, vanity, sub- 
servience, easy-going acceptance of authority, 
shirking of individual responsibility. These 
things were embodied in the court and the 
cavaher, in the papacy and hardly less in the 
episcopacy. They wore, it was admitted, a 
pleasing shape, but the heart of them was 
rotten. 

But reactions always swing too far, and 
the Puritans proved no exception to the rule. 
In casting off worldHness, they cast off, also, 
some of the courtesies of life. In condemn- 
ing subservience and easy-going, they con- 
demned also deference and tolerance. In put- 



MANNERS AND THE PURITAN 113 

ting aside vanity and untruth, they gave up 
a certain daintiness and comeHness in the or- 
dering of Hfe. Not necessarily all at once, and 
certainly not with any intention. It is con- 
ceivable that the effect of this attitude might 
not be apparent at first. I do not know what 
were the manners of my ancestors ; they may 
have been as finished as any courtier's; but I 
know the manners of some of their descend- 
ants, and I am sure no court would find 
them appropriate. 

The old world, and the older religion, 
stood for the efficacy of ritual. ''Never 
mind about thinking," it said in effect, "there 
are those who will do that for you, in govern- 
ment, in learning, in religion. All you need to 
do is to perform the rites as they are laid 
down for you. This way lies salvation." 

The Puritan responded, "This way lurks 
damnation. Ritual is nothing; nay, it is 
worse than nothing if it comes between you 
and the truth. See to it first of all that your 
heart is right. Examine yourself sternly and 
cast out hypocrisy. All else matters little. No 
authority can do a man's thinking for him. 
Each for himself, men must face God. Ob- 



114 MANNERS AND THE PURITAN 

servances, ceremonies, are Popish abomina- 
tions. What does it matter if the outer man 
be altogether pleasing, so long as the soul of 
him is damned?" 

Now, whatever might be the first effect of 
such an attitude, the ultimate effect could 
hardly help being a minimizing of the impor- 
tance of all the externals of life. The theory 
might actually justify a good deal of this, and 
practice might tend to go even further than 
theory. For when once you have said that if 
the heart is right externals are unimportant, 
it is easy, by a confusion of thought very 
common, to assume that externals are not 
merely subordinate to the things of the heart, 
but are actually at war with them. The 
phrases "empty form," "hollow sham," 
"rough honesty," "rugged virtue," indicate 
a tendency to regard the inner and the outer 
virtues as antagonistic. Has a man pleasing 
manners and courteous address? His heart 
may nevertheless be black. This does not, in- 
deed, warrant us in assuming that because he 
has pleasing manners his heart is therefore 
black, yet the passage from one conviction to 
the other is curiously easy. 



MANNERS AND THE PURITAN 115 

The quality that New Englanders worship 
is sincerity, but they can with difficulty con- 
ceive a sincerity that is not also a little rough 
and blunt. Polish rouses their suspicion. 
They can appraise a rough diamond more 
easily than a finished one. I suppose we all 
know the New England mother who says, 
"'Manners are all very well, but what I care 
about in my children is their morals. I would 
rather have my children truthful and good 
than have them learn to bow gracefully and 
say, * Pardon me.'" 

If one suggests in answer that these things 
are not mutually exclusive, that not all rude 
children are truthful nor all well-mannered 
ones hypocrites, she looks at one a little 
askance. She is of those who traditionally and 
sincerely believe that the French are vicious 
in proportion as they are polite, since honesty 
must of necessity be "rugged." 

Such people have no sympathy with the 
theory that the way you behave reacts upon 
the way you feel. They will, perhaps, admit 
that if you do a definite service for some one, 
you are more apt to feel kindly toward him, 
but it has never occurred to them to go 



116 MANNERS AND THE PURITAN 

further and admit that if you behave courte- 
ously, it makes you feel more courteous inside; 
that if you go to meet a person as if you were 
glad to see him, it makes you actually feel 
more glad; that if you kneel, it may make you 
actually feel more reverent. If it did occur to 
them, they would repudiate it as sanctioning 
hypocrisy. Why it should be more hypocriti- 
cal to speak pleasantly and with deference to 
people whom you do not care for than it is 
to give soup or coal to other people whom 
you do not care for, they could not, perhaps, 
fully explain. 

Perhaps this attitude is not quite as un- 
reasonable and unlovely as I am making it 
appear. I am stating it a little perversely, to 
make my point clearer. As a matter of fact. 
New England is not alone in admiring blunt 
honesty and rugged virtue, and in distrusting 
a smooth exterior. It was not a Puritan who 
said that a man might smile and smile and be 
a villain. Yet, when New Englanders quote 
this, they forget that the particular villain 
in question was the only smiling one the 
master created. Did he realize, instinctively, 
perhaps, that to smile and smile and still 



MANNERS AND THE PURITAN 117 

be a villain a man must be an arch- villain 
indeed? 

At all events, these traditions have found 
in New England a soil of peculiar richness, 
and they have flourished exceptionally well. 
Without any explicit assertion that to bow 
is vice and to smile is villainy, there has often 
seemed to be an instinctive feeling that the 
truly honest and high-minded will not stoop 
to garnish their lives with such trumpery 
trimmings. 

Now it should of course be remembered 
that people's principles never have quite the 
influence that we might expect them to have. 
Human nature is an imperfectly unified con- 
glomerate, shot through here and there by a 
ray of principle — if one may use the word 
"ray" of that which seems so often to darken 
rather than illumine. Principles are nothing 
in themselves. They have to be held by par- 
ticular persons, and they are held in all sorts 
of ways. Some carry their principles as cer- 
tain folk do horse-chestnuts, — in their pock- 
ets, as a specific against disease, — and then 
go along much as if they were not there. 
Others wear them like a garment; but there 



118 MANNERS AND THE PURITAN 

were, proverbially, many ways of wearing 
the toga. Others again give their principles a 
more intimate reception. But in such inti- 
macy the influences are reciprocal: often, by 
the time a principle has penetrated through 
a temperament it would not know its own 
countenance. 

So with the New Englander. It is not in 
every individual that the New England tradi- 
tion has had its perfect work. I know many 
in whom it has not. I know some in whom it 
has — people of unflinching honesty, of clear 
integrity, of real benevolence, whose manners 
are distinctly grim, and whose feelings of 
affection and devotion, deep and strong as 
they are, find no habitual expression in ways 
of pleasantness. On the other hand, there is 
in New England a body of people, equally be- 
longing to it, who have not shared this dis- 
tinctively Puritan tradition. 

In almost every New England town, while 
there are many Noncomformist churches, — 
Presbyterian and Congregational and Baptist 
and Methodist, — there is usually also one 
Episcopal church. It is often the littlest one, 
it is almost always the prettiest. The others 



MANNERS AND THE PURITAN 119 

are stern and uncompromising — four walls 
and a roof, windows and a door, and perhaps 
a steeple for the bell. The best of them have, 
in their own way, a very real distinction. But 
the little Episcopal church has something 
different. Shall we ventm^e to call it charm .'^ 
It nestles beside the village street with a cozy 
air, it encourages vines to grow over it. It is 
pleasant and propitiatory and adaptable in 
every line. And within, the congregation and 
those who lead in the service, have usually 
something of this same quahty. Voices are a 
little less strident, manners are a Uttle more 
gracious, than in the other churches. 

I knew a young man who claimed that he 
could tell an Episcopalian by her hats. This, 
I think, is going too far. I should dishke to 
predicate of any denomination the eccentrici- 
ties patent in most women's hats. But, taken 
in moderation, there is something in it. Of 
course, there are exceptions: not all Episco- 
palians have pleasant voices, nor all Presby- 
terians nasal ones. Especially in the cities, 
where the church influence is but a tiny strand 
among a multitude woven into each life, all 
such differences tend to disappear. And even 



120 MANNERS AND THE PURITAN 

in villages, I have seen Episcopal churches as 
ugly as the worst of the Nonconformist, and 
I have seen Presbyterian churches that were 
— well, they were by strangers persistently 
mistaken for the Episcopal. 

Yet it seems to me not unnatural that this 
diflFerence, typically, should exist. For the 
Nonconformists dehberately broke with a tra- 
dition that had its own ripe beauty. They 
distrusted charm. They saw an antagonism 
between beauty and truth. They avoided the 
ways of pleasantness. They felt that con- 
ventions and convictions could not dwell to- 
gether. In all this there was gain and there 
was loss. And when, as all rebels against con- 
vention inevitably do, they erected their own 
conventions, these were relatively stern and 
barren, and a little ungracious. 

All this while I have spoken of New 
England, which is a small part of the United 
States. But the West, so far as it is not for- 
eign, was settled from New England or from 
the South, and its pioneer past is nearer by 
many generations than our own, so that other 
elements enter into the question of manners. 
The South, again, is preponderantly Episco- 



MANNERS AND THE PURITAN 121 

pal — at least the South that we usually 
think of. And this South has, so far as I know, 
not had its manners often called in ques- 
tion. Whether this is a mere coincidence, or 
whether its Episcopacy has really been a con- 
tributing cause, I cannot say. 

In any case, this is not a defense of Episco- 
pacy nor an arraignment of Nonconformity. 
It is a study of possible tendencies involved 
in two rather different attitudes toward life. 
Each is beset by dangers, each achieves its 
characteristic victories. The sins of Non- 
conformity are the sins of presumption and 
intolerance, the sins of rituahsm are the sins 
of formalism and indifference and superfi- 
ciality. The virtues of the one are those of 
independence and honesty and devotion; the 
virtues of the other are those of tolerance and 
deference and kindness. It is, to some extent, 
the individual virtues contrasted with the 
social virtues. 

But all of these are good, all are necessary 
to society, and the pity is that they have not 
always been able to live together companion- 
ably; that one set should drive out the other. 
Perhaps it does no harm to remind ourselves 



122 MANNERS AND THE PURITAN 

that these two attitudes are not the only 
possible ones. As interpretations of life, Non- 
conformity and Episcopacy can learn from 
each other, and the outcome may conceivably 
be something better than either. 



A Matter of Planes 

"My sister and I get along beautifully to- 
gether: she cares only about the big things of 
life, and I care only about the little ones." 
This remark, made to me once by a friend 
of mine, comes into my mind every now and 
then, and I am increasingly amused by its 
astuteness. For nothing seems more capri- 
cious than the basis of our harmonious inter- 
course one with another. We constantly see 
people whom we would aver to be incompati- 
ble, living serenely at peace, while others, 
whose cordial agreement we would as con- 
fidently predict, are quarreling scandalously. 
I believe my friend's remark may throw some 
light on the matter. It amounts to this: 
people on the same plane may clash, people 
on different ones cannot. It is the grade- 
crossings that make trouble. 

Let us see how it works. Here are Bene- 
dick and I living happily together, although 
our acquaintances would "never have ex- 
pected it." We are both of us possessed of 



124 A MATTER OF PLANES 

strong convictions, but they happen not to 
concern the same things. For example, I put 
sugar in my coffee. I think that is the way to 
take coffee, and of course I always put it in 
Benedick's cup too. Now Benedick does n't 
care, — he would scarcely notice if I dropped 
an onion in, because he is thinking about 
civil-service reform and other large matters. 
As he drinks his coffee he talks to me of these 
things, which I regard as unquestionably of 
vital importance, but unquestionably not of 
vital interest. Yet Benedick talks well, and it 
is very becoming to him to be deeply in earn- 
est, and so I like to listen to him. Thus we 
get along together very happily. He accepts 
my little habits, and I accept his big princi- 
ples. The adjustment is perfect. 

On the other hand, there is a certain lady 
who sometimes visits us. She drinks her 
coffee without sugar, and she never sits at 
breakfast with us that she does not evince 
real uneasiness as she watches the white 
cubes being dropped into our steaming cups. 
Benedick has never even noticed that she is 
uneasy, but I have, because, — well, because 
I am living on her plane; for I myself am al- 



A MATTER OF PLANES 125 

ways conscious of a distinct feeling of annoy- 
ance when I see any one put sugar on lettuce. 
Nor is this the only ground of discord between 
us. She has the habit of rising at half-past 
six every morning, and taking a cold bath 
before breakfast. She is never late. I often 
am, and I loathe cold baths, except in the 
ocean. Accordingly, when I come down, I 
find her awaiting me, covered with meritori- 
ousness as with a garment, and I feel myself 
her inferior, a feeling which I resent but can- 
not escape. I find no refuge in philosophy, 
for I have no more philosophy than she has. 
No, we are on the same plane, and we are 
always colliding. 

On the other hand, Benedick likes her very 
well, but for his part cannot get through a 
meal comfortably with his uncle, because 
they disagree about trusts and the tariff. Yet 
his uncle and I always enjoy each other's 
society. He takes three lumps of sugar in 
his coffee and none at all on his lettuce; he 
regularly oversleeps the breakfast hour and 
apologizes handsomely for it afterwards. He 
has, in fact, what I consider a comfortable set 
of habits, and his theories do not disturb me. 



126 A MATTER OF PLANES 

Personally, I find it pleasant to live with 
people who will let me arrange the unimpor- 
tant features of life, while I am quite ready to 
let them settle what one of my teachers used to 
call its " cosmic principles." I can understand 
one's enduring martyrdom for the sake of de- 
tails of taste, but not for such large matters 
as Truth or the Hereafter, which seem to me 
abundantly able to take care of themselves. 

I wonder if this explains why men are less 
apt to quarrel with women than with other 
men, and women less apt to quarrel with men 
than with other women. For the Uves of men 
and women are doubtless on quite dififerent 
planes; they are not apt to feel strongly about 
the same things, and thus each is indulgent 
toward the other's convictions, not being 
deeply touched by them. Have you ever 
noticed at a dinner-party, when one of the 
men is teUing a good story, the difference be- 
tween the attitudes of the other men and of 
the women .^^ The women — except perhaps 
the wife of the speaker — listen easily, re- 
ceptively; the men listen restlessly, each alert 
for a chance to follow up the tale with one of 
his own. For it is perfectly well understood 



A MATTER OF PLANES 127 

that women are not required to tell good 
stories at dinner, and so a woman can enjoy 
them all irresponsibly, while a man feels in 
each one something very hke a challenge. 

On the other hand, when either sex invades 
the other's sphere, there is apt to be trouble. 
We all know how a woman, the ordinary, 
normal woman, feels when the man attempts 
to "interfere" in the household; and a man, 
the ordinary, normal man, has a similar ob- 
jection to women's invading his province. In 
Germany, at a university function some years 
ago, an old professor in conversation with a 
young American woman expressed himself 
rather positively on some economic question. 
She, being fairly well grounded in economics, 
ventured to differ, and began to give her 
reasons for so doing, when he interrupted her 
with a gesture of surprise and irritation, and 
the remark, "I am not accustomed to hear 
myseK contradicted by young women." 

But I suppose some one may object, " Why 
must people on the same plane inevitably 
collide? Why cannot they run companion- 
ably parallel .f^" And indeed this has an at- 
tractive sound; but people's lives do not run 



128 A MATTER OF PLANES 

on artificial tracks. They may move along 
easily side by side for a while, but then — 
crash! The collision comes. 

If you still doubt, try two experiments. 
Find two people deeply interested in 
theological theory, and apparently in agree- 
ment, and set them discussing the matter 
with each other in a really exhaustive way. 
See if they do not separate with some little 
mutual disapproval, if not distrust. "Ah! 

Mr. is not so sound as I had supposed." 

Then, to make the test on the little things 
of life, take two people the most harmonious 
possible, find them in an amiable mood, — I 
will even allow you to give them a good din- 
ner first, — and then set them the task of 
choosing wall-papers for their country home. 
Need I describe the outcome .^^ 

Ah, no ! Our only safety lies in non-conflict- 
ing levels. You who are entering on a matri- 
monial or otherwise friendly compact, put 
not your trust in a harmony based on positive 
agreement: it is shifting sand beneath your 
feet. Ground your happiness in a nice dove- 
tailing of eager conviction with tolerant in- 
diflference, and you are safe for a lifetime. 



A Meditation Concerning Forms 

It was years ago, in Heidelberg. A group of 
young Americans, strolling down one of the 
quaint old streets of the town, approached 
the office of the American Consul, before 
which hung an American flag. As they passed 
the house one of the young men took off his 
hat. The man beside him looked at him, then 
glanced quickly about, as men do, to locate 
the person he was greeting. Another of the 
party fell back and said to him, "Did you see 
a friend .f^ " When one is abroad, chance meet- 
ings gain in importance. The young man 
smiled. " Why — yes — a friend of mine — 
and of yours too, I suppose." He pointed 
back toward the flag, which they had now 
passed. "Oh!" said the other, feeling a Httle 
flat. 

"You see," went on the young man, a 
little sheepishly, — an American man is al- 
ways sheepish when detected in what may 
seem a bit of sentiment, — "I served in the 
militia a good while, and I got in the habit of 



130 A MEDITATION CONCERNING FORMS 

saluting the colors; and over here — some- 
how—" 

"Is he apologizing because he saluted his 
flag?" broke in one of the young women. "'I 
think it's the rest^of us that ought to apolo- 
gize." 

The party moved on, and the incident was 
forgotten until, years afterward, one of the 
group learned that it had borne fruit: it had 
set a fashion, established a tradition. For 
since that time Americans in Heidelberg have 
always saluted their flag where it hangs before 
the office of their consul. 

All this came into my mind last winter 
while I watched another little scene, this 
time in our own country, in a New England 
city. The President of the United States had 
been a guest in a house where some of us had 
been asked to meet him. The President was 
taking leave, and I made one of a group at 
a window watching the Chief Executive and 
his escort take their places in the automobiles. 
Groups of men and boys, who had in some 
way discovered what was happening, were 
lounging about on the street corners, gazing 
curiously at the Presidential party. The 



A MEDITATION CONCERNING FORMS 131 

honorable guests and the honored host ex- 
changed salutes, and the motor-cars moved 
off, while the crowd watched, with its hands 
in its pockets. 

As the group in the window looked out at 
the scene one of them exclaimed: "Well! if 
that is n't the limit!" 

"What?" I asked. 

"Why, did n't you see? Not a man of them 
saluted. They just rubbered!" 

Every one laughed, then we grew grave. 
"What an example for those small boys!" 
said some one. And we fell into a discussion 
of American manners compared with Euro- 
pean. 

Again, last summer, I was one of a huge 
audience witnessing an outdoor pageant. It 
was evening, band music filled the air, spec- 
tacular performances were going on in a bril- 
liant electric illumination. All open spaces 
were thronged and bleachers were full. Sud- 
denly a few people among those on the 
bleachers rose to their feet. "Down! Down 
in front! Sit down, can't you?" was vari- 
ously shouted by those behind, and there 
were growling comments about people who 



132 A MEDITATION CONCERNING FORMS 

stood up when, if everybody sat down, every- 
body could see. The offenders remained 
standing. The growHng comments went on, 
until suddenly some one muttered, "Shut up! 
It's 'The Star-Spangled Banner'!" Where- 
upon the comments died away, and before 
the band had ended the bleacher crowd was 
all on its feet, half ashamed, half amused. 

Now, I find that these three scenes group 
themselves persistently in my mind, and per- 
sistently recur, producing an undercurrent 
of speculation and perhaps even of moral- 
izing. "Ought these things so to be.^" I 
wonder. We Americans are often congrat- 
ulated, we often congratulate ourselves, on 
our emancipation from conventions, from 
forms, from traditions. But are we, I won- 
der, altogether to be congratulated.^ Is it 
entirely to our credit that we are able to 
stand on street corners with our hats on our 
heads and our hands in our pockets while 
our Country, embodied in its Chief Execu- 
tive, passes by? Shall we unreservedly felici- 
tate ourselves that we can stroll past our 
country's flag without an impulse to salute 
it.f^ that we can hear one of our national 



A MEDITATION CONCERNING FORMS 133 

hymns without an impulse to rise? Is this 
emancipation, or is it something else? 

Certainly, informality and unconvention- 
ality are good things within limits, [but are 
we perhaps passing these limits? For, as 
psychologists tell us that we cannot think 
long without words, so perhaps it is also true 
that we cannot feel long without acts — and 
acts are forms. Unquestionably the spirit of 
loyalty may exist while one's hat is on. But 
I wonder if taking off one's hat may not 
perhaps give it a bit of encouragement — like 
a friendly pat on the shoulder of a boy who 
is doing well. 

Moreover, among the young people who 
are growing up among us> who "know not 
Joseph," who think of war as something in 
a textbook, and loyalty as something men- 
tioned in poetry and history — among these, 
would it not give some suggestion and stimu- 
lus to the spirit of patriotism, innate in all 
of us, if they saw those around them giving 
some tangible evidences of the feeling? It is 
undoubtedly true that in some cases a feeling 
grows through being repressed, but it is much 
more often true that it grows through being 



134 A MEDITATION CONCERNING FORMS 

expressed. To throw stones at a cat tends to 
make a boy cruel, while to feed it and pet it 
and care for it tends to make him tender- 
hearted. The feeling causes the action, but 
the action reacts on the feeling. This is the 
vital circuit. 

So it is with the feelings of loyalty and 
patriotism. From the ages of savagery down- 
ward, kings and priests, whether they formu- 
lated the theory or not, acted in accordance 
with sound psychology when they instituted 
elaborate ceremonials by which the people 
might give expression to their feeling of rever- 
ence. We do not wish to return to barbarism. 
We do not even wish to wrap ourselves about 
in all the forms and ceremonies of modern 
European life, as they appear in some of its 
phases. But I wonder whether, in throw- 
ing oflE these cumbrous vestments, we have not 
got rid of a little too much. Might there not 
be something midway between the full regalia 
of a coronation procession and — let us say 
— a bathing suit? I wonder, to change the fig- 
ure, whether, in our reaction from all formal- 
ity, we are not in danger, as the Germans say, 
of "throwing out the child with the bath." 



The Tyranny of Things 

Two fifteen-year-old girls stood eyeing one 
another on first acquaintance. Finally one 
little girl said, "Which do you like best, 
people or things?" The other little girl said, 
"Things." They were friends at once. 

I suppose we all go through a phase when 
we like things best; and not only like them, 
but want to possess them under our hand. 
The passion for accumulation is upon us. We 
make "collections," we fill our rooms, our 
walls, our tables, our desks, with things, 
things, things. 

Many people never pass out of this phase. 
They never see a flower without wanting to 
pick it and put it in a vase, they never enjoy 
a book without wanting to own it, nor a pic- 
ture without wanting to hang it on their walls. 
They keep photographs of all their friends and 
kodak albums of all the places they visit, they 
save all their theater programmes and dinner 
cards, they bring home all their alpenstocks. 
Their houses are filled with an undigested 



136 THE TYRANNY OF THINGS 

mass of things, like the terminal moraine 
where a glacier dumps at length everything it 
has picked up during its progress through 
the lands. 

But to some of us a day comes when we 
begin to grow weary of things. We realize 
that we do not possess them; they possess us. 
Our books are a burden to us, our pictures 
have destroyed every restful wall-space, our 
china is a care, our photographs drive us mad, 
our programmes and alpenstocks fill us with 
loathing. We feel stifled with the sense of 
things, and our problem becomes, not how 
much we can accumulate, but how much we 
can do without. We send our books to the 
village library, and our pictures to the col- 
lege settlement. Such things as we cannot 
give away, and have not the courage to de- 
stroy, we stack in the garret, where they lie 
huddled in dim and dusty heaps, removed 
from our sight, to be sure, yet still faintly im- 
portiuiate. 

Then, as we breathe more freely in the clear 
space that we have made for ourselves, we 
grow aware that we must not relax our vigi- 
lance, or we shall be once more overwhelmed. 



THE TYRANNY OF THINGS 137 

For it is an age of things. As I walk through 
the shops at Christmas time and survey their 
contents, I find it a most depressing spectacle. 
All of us have too many things already, and 
here are more! And everybody is going to 
send some of them to everybody else ! I sym- 
pathize with one of my friends, who, at the 
end of the Christmas festivities, said, "If I 
see another bit of tissue paper and red ribbon, 
I shall scream." 

It extends to all our doings. For every 
event there is a "souvenir." We cannot go to 
luncheon and meet our friends but we must 
receive a token to carry away. Even our 
children cannot have a birthday party, and 
play games, and eat good things, and be 
happy. The host must receive gifts from 
every little guest, and provide in return some 
little remembrance for each to take home. 
Truly, on all sides we are beset, and we go 
lumbering along through life like a ship en- 
crusted with barnacles, which can never cut 
the waves clean and sure and swift until she 
has been scraped bare again. And there seems 
little hope for us this side our last port. 

And to think that there was a time when 



138 THE TYRANNY OF THINGS 

folk had not even that hope! When a man's 
possessions were burned with him, so that he 
might, forsooth, have them all about him in 
the next world! Suffocating thought! To 
think one could not even then be clear of 
things, and make at least a fresh start ! That 
must, indeed, have been in the childhood of 
the race. 

Once upon a time, when I was very tired, 
I chanced to go away to a little house by 
the sea. "It is empty," they said, "but you 
can easily furnish it." Empty ! Yes, thank 
Heaven! Furnish it? Heaven forbid! Its 
floors were bare, its walls were bare, its 
tables — there were only two in the house — 
were bare. There was nothing in the closets 
but books; nothing in the bureau drawers but 
the smell of clean, fresh wood; nothing in the 
kitchen but an oil stove, and a few — a very 
few — dishes; nothing in the attic but rafters 
and sunshine, and a view of the sea. After I 
had been there an hour there descended upon 
me a great peace, a sense of freedom, of in- 
finite leisure. In the twilight I sat before the 
flickering embers of the open fire, and looked 
out through the open door to the sea, and 



THE TYRANNY OF THINGS 139 

asked myself, "Why?" Then the answer 
came: I was emancipated from things. There 
was nothing in the house to demand care, to 
claim attention, to cumber my consciousness 
with its insistent, unchanging companionship. 
There was nothing but a shelter, and outside, 
the fields and marshes, the shore and the sea. 
These did not have to be taken down and put 
up and arranged and dusted and cared for. 
They were not things at all, they were pow- 
ers, presences. 

And so I rested. While the spell was still 
unbroken, I came away. For broken it would 
have been, I know, had I not fled first. Even 
in this refuge the enemy would have pursued 
me, found me out, encompassed me. V 

If we could but free ourselves once for all, 
how simple life might become ! One of my 
friends, who, with six young children and 
only one servant, keeps a spotless house and 
a soul serene, told me once how she did it. 
*'My dear, once a month I give away every 
single thing in the house that we do not im- 
peratively need. It sounds wasteful, but I 
don't believe it really is. Sometimes Jere- 
miah mourns over missing old clothes, or back 



140 THE TYRANNY OF THINGS 

numbers of the magazines, but I tell him if 
he does n't want to be mated to a gibbering 
maniac he will let me do as I like." 

The old monks knew all this very well. 
One wonders sometimes how they got their 
power; but go up to Fiesole, and sit a while in 
one of those little, bare, white-walled cells, 
and you will begin to understand. If there 
were any spiritual force in one, it would have 
to come out there. 

I have not their courage, and I win no such 
freedom. I allow myself to be overwhelmed 
by the invading host of things, making fitful 
resistance, but without any real steadiness of 
purpose. Yet never do I wholly give up the 
struggle, and in my heart I cherish an ideal, 
remotely typified by that empty little house 
beside the sea. 



The Tyranny of Facts 

Once upon a time, very long ago, when I was 
young, I used to dream of all the things I 
would some day possess. As time went on, 
the nature of the things I coveted changed, 
but not the dream of possession. Then, as 
some of these dreams found their fulfillment, 
a fundamental reconstruction of ideals took 
place. I dreamed no longer of possession, but 
of enfranchisement; I no longer wished for 
more things, but only for the power to cope 
with the things I already had — or that had 
me. And at last my strongest desire was to 
possess nothing — but friends. 

Of late, I notice, the same thing that hap- 
pened in my house has happened in my head. 
There was a time when I loved to collect in- 
formation. Facts — all facts — were precious 
to me, and I loved to feel them making piles 
and stacks and rows in my brain. Every- 
thing was welcome, from the names of the 
stars to the prepositions that governed the 
Latin ablative, from the dynasties of Egypt 



142 THE TYRANNY OF FACTS 

to the geography Hsts of " state products '* — 
"corn, wheat, and potatoes," "rice, sugar, 
cotton, and tobacco." While this mania was 
upon me, dictionaries allured me, cyclo- 
paedias held me spellbound. I was even able 
to read with interest the annals of the " Swiss 
Family Robinson," a book which presents 
more facts per page than any other volume 
in that great and unclassified mob called 
"fiction." 

What were the causes and processes of 
change I cannot say. Possibly an overdose of 
facts produced reaction. At all events, the 
change took place, and the time has now 
come when, just as I deprecate the arrival of 
new possessions in my house, even thus do 
I deplore the stream of information whose 
constant, relentless flow into my unwilling 
consciousness I am powerless to prevent. For 
I find that whereas during my years of en- 
thusiasm for accumulation everything com- 
bined to help me, now that my endeavors are 
reversed the powers arrayed against me are 
mighty. The Sunday newspaper, which is the 
embodiment of information invading the last 
stronghold of peace, — this I can and do bar 



THE TYRANNY OF FACTS 143 

out of my house; but on week-days the news- 
papers have things their own way. They 
invade my morning quiet, they disturb my 
evening calm, they render the male section of 
my family indifferent to morning coffee and 
dilatory before evening soup. Nor am I my- 
self exempt from the baleful influence. Vari- 
ous digests of the ''world's news" lie con- 
stantly upon my table, and I am occasionally 
weak enough to think it my duty to read 
them, "so as to be a little intelligent, you 
know," as a firm-minded aunt of mine is in 
the habit of saying. In this unwilling en- 
deavor to acquire intelligence I stultify what 
little of that faculty I may have been origin- 
ally endowed with, I stuff my brain with 
cotton, in the form of "science brevities," 
"literary jottings," "religious notes," "po- 
litical news," and so on. And then for a time 
a violent reaction sets in, and I eschew all 
informing books and hie me to Lamb, to 
Shelley, to Malory, to Homer. These are my 
joy, my recreation, my tonic. 

Nor is it only the newspapers and their 
kind with which I have to contend. My 
dearest friends are traitors and my foes are 



144 THE TYRANNY OF FACTS 

they of my own household. For they cling to 
the possessions of their brains, they are busy 
amassing more, they survey them with satis- 
faction and exhibit them with pride, so that I 
am driven to question, which of us is right? 
Is the change in me due to growing wisdom 
or to oncoming senility? 

In my outdoor life the same issue is con- 
stantly presenting itself. I love birds and 
flowers. In fact, I believe that I honestly love 
that grand and joyous conglomerate usually 
called "Nature." There was a time, more- 
over, during that remote period of which I 
have spoken, when I possessed a respectable 
amount of information about these matters. 
Just as, in my lust for physical possessions, 
I collected butterflies and eggs and flowers, 
even so in my lust for intellectual possessions 
I accumulated knowledge — I learned all 
their names, I knew all about their wings and 
their spots and their petals and their seeds 
and their roots and whatever else apper- 
tained to them. It amazes me now when I 
occasionally stumble upon some record of my 
former knowledge. I feel like saying, with the 
old woman in Mother Goose, — 



THE TYRANNY OF FACTS 145 

" Lawk a massy on me! 
This is none of I!" 

But following my feeling of amazement there 
usually comes one of relief — how glad I am 
that I don't know all that now! I still love 
"Nature," but when I have found the lovely 
flower in the meadow or the deep wood, I do 
not hasten to pick it and bring it home and 
analyze it and press it. I am content to lie 
down beside it a while and enjoy its compan- 
ionship, its beauty, its fragrance, whatever it 
has of charm and comeliness, and then I leave 
it and pass on. When I hear a sweet bird- 
note, I pause and listen as it comes again and 
yet again. But I do not pursue the bird with 
an opera-glass to count its feathers and esti- 
mate its dimensions, and then hurry home to 
my "bird books" to "look it up" and make 
a marginal note of the date. When I see 
butterflies fluttering about the lilacs and the 
syringas and the phlox, I stand quiet and 
watch them — those huge pale yellow ones 
banded with black that love to hang about 
lavender flowers — do they know what a 
lovely chord of color they strike? those dark 
ones with blues and greens splashed on their 



146 THE TYRANNY OF FACTS 

wing-edges, those rich rusty-red ones, with 
pure silver flashes on their under sides, those 
little jagged-winged beauties with all the 
colors of an Oriental rug — old reds, old 
blues, old yellows — all mottled together. 
Ah, they are all delightful, and as I watch 
this favorite and that, holding my breath lest 
I scare him into flight, I find myself smiling 
to think, I knew his name once ! 

But most of my friends still know their 
names. They have opera-glasses and note- 
books, and a prodigious amount of informa- 
tion. They keep tally of the number of birds 
they see in a day or on a walk or on a drive, 
of the number of new birds or flowers they 
recognize in a season. They call me up by 
telephone to tell me that the beautiful crea- 
ture we had seen in a certain tree was, after 
all, not the Apteryx Americanus, but the 
Apteryx Warrensis, a much rarer variety of 
the same species, with longer tail feathers 
and two more white feathers in the wing than 
his commonplace cousin. 

Amid such whirlpools of information I feel 
that I am unable to hold my own, and so I 
try to drift out, but now and again I am 



THE TYRANNY OF FACTS 147 

drawn in, and I find myself growing stupid as 
I bend over my friends' bird books. I give 
myself headaches looking at their butterfly 
cabinets — real butterflies on the phlox and 
the lilacs never seem to give me headaches. 

I have said that I do not regret the change 
in myself, that I would not, if I could, gather 
up the stores of information I once possessed 
and refurnish my brain with them, — no, not 
even if I could arrange them all in order, 
cleaned and dusted and sorted ready to be 
used or admired. Let them go ! Some of them 
have already gone altogether, thrown away, 
dropped into cracks, burned up, ground into 
powder, dissolved into nothing. Some lie, 
perhaps, piled up in the dusty garrets of my 
brain, huddled together in formless heaps, or 
stowed close in the old chests of memory that 
are never opened. If I searched I might find 
them, and drag them out, and perhaps among 
them I might discover some treasures, but I 
shall never search. I shall let them all lie to- 
gether in the quiet, dusty twilight, not to be 
disturbed until the whole mansion, from dim 
attic to sunlit living-rooms, shall perish to be 
known no more. 



Travelers' Letters 

I AM not a traveling person, but many of my 
friends are, and as the season of the year 
arrives when they are saying good-bye and 
departing to the ends of the earth, I am de- 
pressed. Let no one misunderstand me. I am 
not depressed because of the good-byes. I 
love my friends, and it gives me a pang to see 
the gangplank pulled in, but after they are 
gone and I have taken up my placid way 
again, I am well content in a realization of 
their existence and their welfare. Nor is it 
the outward ceremonies, the pomp and cir- 
cumstance of departure that I envy them. 
My small contributions to it — boxes of 
candy, baskets of oranges, modest pints of 
champagne — these I send cheerfully, nothing 
grudging, though I confess to regret when they 
miss fire, or are absorbed by the steward on 
the way. 

Nor, lastly, do I envy them their travels. 
The ends of the earth to which they wend are, 
no doubt, pleasant; but my end is pleasant. 



TRAVELERS' LETTERS 149 

too, and I do not repine that my summer 
paths are the quiet, homely ones of old New 
England. 

No, my depression arises from none of 
these things. It comes — I hesitate to con- 
fess the brutal truth — from the thought of 
the letters my Summer-in-Europe friends will 
write me. There! It is told! 

And yet, I insist, I am really not a brute. 
I love my friends dearly, and when they go 
away to certain places — Maine, or the 
White Mountains, or Cape Cod — I love to get 
letters from them. But not when they go to 
Europe. There is something about Europe — 
and, I may add, California and all World's 
Fairs — that works mortal havoc with the 
friendly letter. I might almost say that so 
far as I am concerned a real, genuine friendly 
letter from Europe does not exist, unless the 
writer has settled down and lived in Europe 
until it has become home. Perhaps this is the 
real trouble. My friends galloping about the 
map are not at home. They are alert, beset 
with outward experiences to which they are 
giving continuous, restless response, and their 
letters are correspondingly rapid, restless, ex- 



150 TRAVELERS' LETTERS 

ternal, full of places and things and people, 
viewed rapidly and superficially; and all, no 
matter from whom, bear a strong family re- 
semblance — they are travelers' letters. They 
reek of hotels and trains, they suggest monu- 
ments, museums — in a word — "sights." 

Now, I have no objection to "sights" as 
such, nor to hotels and trains and museums. 
Monuments, indeed, of all sorts, except the 
Pyramids, I do hold in execration, but I 
try not to be unpleasant about them, and it 
is only when these things are offered me as 
a substitute for friends that I protest. 

I am not unreasonable. I do not expect all 
my friends to be brilliant letter writers. A 
dull letter from a dear friend is one of the com- 
monest — and pleasantest — things in life. 
But I want to feel my friend, not Europe, at 
the other end of the letter. If she is at home, 
in her habitual courses, she writes me little, 
pleasant humdrum things about her life, gives 
me a glimpse of her moods, of her real welfare. 
She does this even, as I have said, if she is at 
Cape Cod, or down in Maine. But abroad she 
cannot do it — instead she tries to serve up 
Europe to me ! And Europe I can do without. 



TRAVELERS' LETTERS 151 

at least Europe in just this form. Parts of it 
I, even I, have seen. And for the rest I am 
content to wait, or if, meanwhile, I grow im- 
patient, and wish to learn more about Venice 
or Paris or the Tyrol, about this picture or 
that cathedral, I know several ways of find- 
ing out. From my friends abroad, all I ask is 
a friendly letter now and then, but, ah me! 
this is the very thing I never get! Why, it 
passes me to say. Is European travel a uni- 
versal leveler, blotting out all individuality, 
an encouragement of the commonplace and 
the external .f^ Is every one uninteresting 
away from home.'^ I have sometimes thought 
so, as I have surveyed a steamerful of people 
or an automobile-load of tourists. And yet 
this does not seem wholly probable. At all 
events, though I cannot account for them, 
I am sure of my facts. Already I feel in an- 
ticipation the dreariness of those first letters 
that will come traveling back to me — letters 
written usually in pale ink or in pencil, on 
very thin paper, and usually cross-lined. 
Perhaps, now I think of it, this adds a last 
touch of exasperation to my feelings — this 
thin paper and bad ink. If they would only 



152 TRAVELERS* LETTERS 

use a good, thick, cream-white sheet and 
write half the amount, I should take it kindly, 
but I find it doubly irritating to spend an 
hour, in a good light, deciphering things that 
are entirely indifferent to me when read. It 
tries me, when I want to know from Beatrice 
whether Hero's hair is growing in curly or 
straight after her fever, to work painfully 
among cross-hatchings, only to discover that 
''we took the train at 5 p.m. and arrived at 
7, in time for supper on the summit — the 
view was magnificent — wish you were with 
us!" 

There are, of course, exceptions. One of 
my friends once spent a long summer in a 
tiny village in the Black Forest. She wrote 
comfortable, homey letters about nothing in 
particular, and I treasured them. But this 
exception only proves my point — she did 
not write traveling letters because she did not 
travel. Again, another friend once sent me a 
letter from Florence that was a gem. Pictures? 
Monasteries.^ Olive groves .^^ No, none of 
these were remotely mentioned — thank for- 
tune! Her letter was one long tirade against 
the habits of a certain group of foreigners — 



TRAVELERS' LETTERS 153 

I will not say of what nation — in regard to 
their use of the toothpick! She was in such a 
state of exasperation when she wrote it that 
she was absolutely herself. I felt as if she had 
sat beside me, temper and all, and I had 
heard and seen her talk. I did not care in the 
least about foreign manners, but oh, that was 
a good letter! Which again, I think, proves 
my point. 

Yes, my summer letters are dreary affairs. 
And of late years my troubles are aggravated 
by that last insult to friendship, the ''sou- 
venir" post-card. At this point language fails 
me. I have no words in which to speak of this 
abomination. It symbolizes the triumph of 
the commonplace, of the cheap-and-easy, the 
utter capitulation of individuality. And they 
will pour in upon me — post-cards in black 
and white, post-cards in colors, post-cards of 
all the famous pictures, of all the cathedrals, 
views, mountains, hotels, donkeys, peasants, 
in all tourist-Europe, and occasionally, horror 
of horrors, comic post-cards! On their edges 
will be scrawled flying words, and some ini- 
tials, and as I decipher them I can see the 
counter where the things were purchased — 



154 TRAVELERS' LETTERS 

the crowd of tourists choosing "sets," some 
for collections, some for poor absent friends 
like me; I can see them scribbling their mes- 
sages, with ink and pen furnished by the 
provident shopkeeper, and then hurrying on 
to their trains or their boats or their trams. 
Souvenir post-cards indeed! To me who 
loathe the very name of souvenir! To me 
who so dearly love a quiet letter from a friend, 
written infrequently, perhaps, but in peace of 
spirit! 

There seems to be no hope ahead. 'As the 
summers pass my trials of this sort grow 
greater rather than less. The letters grow 
more and more rapid, more and more rest- 
less, more and more external, and the post- 
cards pile up ad nauseam ! I have never pro- 
tested before, except in spirit. I can do so 
now only under the shelter of anonymity. If 
I criticize my friends it will pain them, and, I 
persist, I love my friends dearly. [And so as 
the season comes round, I am depressed. 
Some summer I may even bedriven to go to 
Europe myself! 



The Novelist's Choice 

For a number of years, in my desultory novel- 
reading, I have found myseK occasionally 
dropping into a particular line of speculation. 
As I re-read "The Mill on the Floss," for in- 
stance, I fall to wondering what kind of story 
it would have made if George EUot had 
allowed Tom;^to tell it. He would have done 
it bluntly, honestly, without condoning his 
own faults and mistakes, we may be sure; but 
also, we may be equally sure, without con- 
doning Maggie's. We should probably have 
been left in the dark as to the motiving of her 
acts. Stephen Guest would have fared rather 
badly, Philip Wakem even worse, and Mrs. 
TuUiver and Sister Glegg and Sister Pullet 
would hardly have come in as characters at 
all, since Tom had none of the special sort of 
humorous sense to which they appeal. Very 
likely Tom would have failed as signally to 
do justice to his own character as to Maggie's 
— his powers were not in the line of conscious 
self-portrayal. 



156 THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 

The more I speculate about this, the more 
amused and interested I am. And when, 
after it, I come back to the real story, as it 
was actually written, I find myself keener 
to appreciate the things which I discover 
there — the embodied result of the novelist's 
choice to tell her story as she did i and not 
otherwise. 

I have sometimes tried "Henry Esmond" 
in the same way. I fancy it told, for example, 
through the letters or the diary of Beatrix. 
What a stormy recital it would be! Frag- 
mentary, capricious, concealing more than it 
revealed, for Beatrix would never have been 
what is called simply honest, even with her- 
self. And yet, whatever she wrote, however 
she posed, whatever tricks of the spirit she 
perpetrated, I fancy we could have guessed at 
her story and her nature in spite of herself. 
The more one thinks of it, the more one longs 
for a chance to try, anyhow — to have at 
those letters or that diary. And then one 
remembers, — to be sure ! there are no letters, 
there is no diary; we were only supposing. 
What a pity! Yet could we, for their sakes, 
give up the story as it is.^^ 



THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 157 

Or, again, imagine the story told in the 
modern, dramatic way: not by any character 
acting as narrator, not by the author as 
author, not by anybody seK-confessed, but 
allowed to enact itself upon the pages of the 
book as upon a stage — a few stage-directions 
supplied in place of scenery and real action, 
each participant speaking in turn, and the 
reader left to orient himself as he can. Fancy 
the beginning: — 

" My name is Henry Esmond." 

" His name is Henry Esmond, sure enough," 
said Mrs. Worksop. 

" So this is the little priest," said Lord 
Castlewood. " Welcome, kinsman." 

"He is saying his prayers to Mamma!" 
said little Beatrix. 

But no, don't fancy it! Let us stop right 
here, and go back to those leisurely and delib- 
erate first chapters as they now stand. Al- 
ready one feels a little ashamed of having 
allowed one's self to lay such unhallowed 
hands upon the tale, and one determines to 
cease experimenting, at least upon Henry 
Esmond, and leave him to the undisputed 
possession of his grave, decorous, and alto- 



158 THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 

gether delightful narrative. And yet, this 
habit of speculation once formed, one is 
tempted ever afresh to its indulgence — 
tempted often at the most unexpected point: 
as I read over the pretty drama of "Romeo 
and Juliet," I am by some freak of the mind 
led to wonder what their story would sound 
like, told by Juliet's nurse. 

It seems curious that writers themselves 
have not experimented in this way with their 
own material. Browning, indeed, the king of 
experimenters, did it once. But, except "The 
Ring and the Book," I do not think of any- 
thing of the kind. And "The Ring and the 
Book" is so much more than a study in story- 
telling that it is as well to leave it with this 
passing mention. 

Obviously, it makes a difference, this choice 
of the novelist. It is, of course, only one of 
the things that go to determining what a 
novel will be like, but it is surely one. Thack- 
eray is always Thackeray, whether he chooses 
to tell his tale through the mouth of one of his 
characters or to step forward in his own per- 
son and talk frankly about his people as they 
pass before him. He is still Thackeray, yet 



THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 159 

there is a vast difference between the at- 
mosphere of "Esmond," which gives us the 
peaceful and dehberate reminiscences of an 
old man, and the atmosphere of "Vanity 
Fair," where the author is avowedly himself, 
like a showman with his puppets. Perhaps it 
was the choice of the novelist that produced 
the difference, perhaps it was something in- 
herent in the two tales, as he regarded them, 
that led to the choice. At all events, the 
choice itself is worth thinking of. 

The expedient of putting a story into the 
mouth of one of the actors in it — that is, the 
autobiographical method — has great anti- 
quity, being at least as old as the Odyssey. 
Vernon Lee, in an interesting if whimsical 
essay of hers on " Literary Construction," 
maintains that it is essentially an expedient 
of immaturity. "I have no doubt," she says, 
"that most of the stories which we have all 
written between the ages of fifteen and twenty 
were either in the autobiographical or the 
epistolary form . . . and altogether repro- 
duced, in their immaturity, the forms of an 
immature period of novel- writing, just as 
Darwinism tells us that the feet and legs of 



160 THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 

babies reproduce the feet and legs of mon- 
keys. For, difficult as it is to realize, the 
apparently simplest form of construction is 
by far the most difficult; and the straight- 
forward narrative of men and women's feel- 
ings and passions, of anything save their 
merest outward acts — the narrative which 
makes the thing pass naturally before the 
reader's mind — is by far the most difficult, 
as it is the most perfect." 

Stevenson, whose powers as a story-teller 
can hardly be cajled immatm'e, yet averred 
that it was the easiest way. He writes to 
Edmund Gosse, " Yes, honestly, fiction is very 
difficult. . . . And the difficulty of according 
the narrative and the dialogue (in a work in 
the third person) is extreme. That is one 
reason out of half a dozen why I so often 
prefer the first." 

Evidently here he was thinking more of 
style than of construction, and one would like 
to know the rest of the haK dozen reasons 
why he preferred the first person for his sto- 
ries. Perhaps we can guess at some of them. 
For the autobiographical form seems to settle 
a good many other matters besides this one 



THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 161 

of literary pitch. It prescribes in many ways 
the point of view. The general attitude of the 
actor-narrator toward the chain of events 
which he relates, is predetermined by his own 
part in those events. 

But probably the strongest justification for 
the form is that it carries with it a certain 
air of genuineness. A man's own story has 
a value as such, as the newspaper interview 
testifies every day. It imposes upon us, in 
spite of ourselves, a prepossession in favor of 
its truth. Now, whatever else the novelist 
may wish to do, he always, first of all, wishes 
to create in his readers this illusion of reality. 
He wants to have his story seem true. He 
knows, indeed, that it is not true. We know 
it is not true. He knows that we know. And 
yet, he will spend months in dull research for 
the sake of supplying his tale with certain 
small earmarks of veracity that may, per- 
chance, trick the public into a moment of 
doubt. He will furnish forth his story with 
elaborate introductions and appendices, ac- 
counting for his own share, and the pub- 
lisher's share, in it, with the hope that he may 
be able to persuade us, at least for half an 



162 THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 

hour, that he, the author, is really and truly 
only the "interested friend" to whom the 
papers were left; that he has really been only 
the recipient of a dying confession, only the 
discoverer of a long-hidden diary. And if he 
succeeds, what triumph! Is there any one 
who would be proof against the flattery im- 
plied in such inquiries as were aroused by 
"Nancy Stair" as to the real genealogy of 
the Stair family? 

To this endeavor to make his story seem 
like the narrative of actual occurrences the 
novelist has been partly driven by the atti- 
tude of his readers. "Convincing" is the 
critic's word now — a novel must be "con- 
vincing." The word is modern, the attitude 
which it connotes is modern. Not that read- 
ers of old did not find pleasure in giving them- 
selves up to the story-teller. But they gave 
themselves up more easily than readers do 
now. The old story-teller began his tale 
smoothly enough: "There was once a beauti- 
ful girl, who had a cruel step-mother and two 
wicked step-sisters." Very good. His listen- 
ers, with a habit of acquiescence, accepted at 
once the beauty of the heroine, the cruelty 



THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 163 

and wickedness of the others. For them the 
tale was sufficiently convincing. Even the 
fairy godmother passed unchallenged. Who 
knew that fairy godmothers might not exist 
somewhere.'^ 

But we have lost the habit of acquiescence. 
We are proving all things, and we hold fast 
to very little. We challenge, we scrutinize, 
we dissect. We have opinions about the lim- 
its of the possible, the probable, and the inev- 
itable. And nothing really satisfies us but the 
inevitable. 

To make his tale seem inevitable, then, is 
the author's ambition, and he is aware that 
if he is to do this he cannot get to work in the 
old manner. If he begins, " There was once a 
beautiful girl, with a cruel step-mother and 
two wicked — " "Ah, wait!" says his reader, 
"this will never do. Cruelty and wickedness 
are easy words to say, but the things them- 
selves are not to be thus lightly denominated. 
One must discriminate. How about the step- 
mother's point of view.f^ In just what way 
was she cruel .^^ How did she become so? How 
do you know she existed at all? She does not 
seem to us a very real person. She is not con- 



164 THE NOVELIST^S CHOICE 

vincing. I don't think I care to finish this 
story." 

The modern story-teller cannot help being 
conscious of this attitude on the part of his 
readers. Probably he has it himself, to some 
extent, toward his own material. What won- 
der, then, if, aware of the effectiveness of the 
expedient, he passes his story over to one of 
his characters, and loads upon his shoulders 
the burden of making it "convincing." 

This seems, on the face of it, an easy way 
out. It shifts responsibility from the author 
to the hero, or whoever it is who is telling the 
story. "How do I know.^ I know because I 
was there. She was my step-mother." It is 
the old reply of iEneas to Dido: "Quorum 
pars magna fui." 

And not merely an easy way out, but often 
an excellent way. We have only to run over 
a few titles, to realize the possibilities of the 
autobiography as a literary form: "Henry 
Esmond," " Robinson Crusoe," " Lorna 
Doone," "Jane Eyre," "Kidnapped," "David 
Balfour," "Peter Ibbetson," "Harry Rich- 
mond," "Joseph Vance," — good books, 
indeed! 



THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 165 

With such a Hst before us, it may seem 
presumptuous to hint that the autobiogra- 
phical form has its Hmitations and its draw- 
backs. Yet I beheve it has. For, first, there is 
a danger in it arising from a fact inherent in 
human nature: the fact that heroes and min- 
strels are not usually made of the same stuff. 
One does things, the other tells about them. 
The person whom adventures befall is not 
necessarily the one who is best able to relate 
them. It is not always so, of course. There 
are rare beings who are born with the hero 
and the minstrel soul bound together within 
them — the Odysseus and the ^neas souls. 
For them it is very well. It was well for 
Odysseus, in the hall of the Phseacians, and 
for ^neas, in the court of Dido, to tell their 
adventures. They were doubly gifted, for 
action and for expression. But what if Achilles 
had tried to tell his story? Or A j ax his .^^ Poor, 
inarticulate Ajax! There was plenty to tell, 
but what a botch he would have made of it! 
He is better off, he and Achilles too, in the 
hands of Homer. 

The race of the inarticulate has not yet 
died out. It never will. But we would not 



166 THE NOVELIST*S CHOICE 

wish to miss the teUing of their stories because 
it must be done by other Kps than theirs. The 
story of Quasimodo, the story of Tess, the 
story of Dorothea Brooke, the story of Clara 
Middleton, the story of Isabel Archer, these 
are all, for various reasons, stories which could 
never have come from the characters them- 
selves. Some of them, perhaps, could have 
told, but never would have done so. Others 
would, perhaps, but never could. Most of 
them probably neither would nor could. And 
we are glad, when we think about them, that 
their authors did not force them to the con- 
fessional against their natures. 

Authors are not always so considerate. I 
have read autobiographical novels where the 
pleasure of the story was continually clouded 
by a feeling of protest that it should have 
been told thus. David BaKour, in certain 
parts of it, gives me this feeling. When he is 
telling his adventures it is well enough, though 
even there I should sometimes be glad if the 
story could have been told quite directly and 
simply by the author. I should like to know 
how David looked now and then, as well as 
what he did. And, of course, David was not 



THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 167 

the kind of fellow who would ever know how 
he looked; still less could he ever have written 
it down as part of an account of his life. But 
when it comes to his love affairs, and I find 
him writing these down in some detail, I must 
protest, "Oh, David! You know you never 
would have told that!" And then I find my- 
self suddenly regarding David with suspicion. 
I long to step into the story and pull his hair 
and see if it is not, after all, only a wig — to 
pull his nose, and see if the mask does n't 
come off, disclosing, not David at all, but 
David's author, Stevenson. 

Ah, there is the danger! The story must 
be told, the secrets must be laid bare — 
secrets guarded not by big keys and heavy 
boulders of rock, but by the walls of impene- 
trable reserve in our own human nature. If 
they are not told, we are baffled and disap- 
pointed. If they are told, we are critical. It is 
a dilemma. 

Sometimes, indeed, the problem is success- 
fully met. In "Lorna Doone," for example, 
John Ridd, — plain John Ridd, — telling his 
own love story, manages to steer along the 
narrow channel between too much reserve 



168 THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 

and too little. He loves Lorna, he is not 
ashamed to confess that to all the world, but 
as to what he says to Lorna about it, or what 
she says to him, this is a matter which in 
his opinion is nobody's business but his and 
hers. And one can almost see the shy, yet 
humorous half -smile and heightened color 
with which he backs away from a love scene 
and cannily edges round it, to take up the 
narrative again further on. One could wish 
that David Balfour had learned a lesson of 
John. 

Moreover, as I have already suggested in 
the case of David, the autobiographical form 
is unsatisfactory in another way. If, on the 
one hand, it gives us too much of the hero- 
autobiographer's private soul, so that we pray 
for a little decent reserve, on the other hand, 
it often gives us too little of his public face, 
too little of the commonplace externals of his 
personality. And here again the trouble arises 
from certain universal facts of human experi- 
ence. For we are accustomed to get at people 
from the outside. We look at their faces, we 
watch them walk, we listen to their voices, 
we notice what clothes they wear and how 



THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 169 

they wear them, we regard them in their 
goings-out and their comings-in, and after a 
while we arrive, or think we arrive, at a cer- 
tain intimacy with what we call their souls. 
We say we know them. Perhaps we do, and 
perhaps we don't, but at any rate, such knowl- 
edge as we have is reached in this way. It is 
the way we are accustomed to; we know how 
to value and allow for its data, how to dis- 
count its deceptions — perhaps we even like 
its baffling reserves. 

Now, in the autobiographical novel, all this 
is reversed: instead of approaching the hero 
from the outside, we approach him from the 
inside. Instead of looking into his eyes, we 
look out of them. In a sense, doubtless, we 
know him better than if we had approached 
him through the ordinary channels, but in 
another sense we do not know him so well. 
It is too much like the way we know — or 
rather the way we fail to know — ourselves. 
And so, in the autobiographical novel one 
sometimes grows a little tired of looking from 
within, out. One longs to stand off and get a 
good plain view of the hero's nose, and his 
eyes. One wants to see him walk down the 



170 THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 

street, instead of walking down the street in- 
side him. 

Authors reahze this, at least by flashes, and 
they try to gratify us, sometimes in very 
amusing ways., Here is Marcelle Tinayre, for 
example, in *'Helle," which is the autobiog- 
raphy of a young girl. She is beautiful, — 
she manages to imply that without involving 
herself in any breach of decorum, — but she 
must in some way be described more fully. 
So the author makes her stand before a mirror 
in her ball-gown and set down what she sees 
there. The ruse is obvious. The action, which 
would have been natural — indeed inevitable 
— for a person like Marie Bashkirtseff , is for 
Helle entirely out of character. But what 
would you have? The reader must be told 
what she looked like. 

On the other hand, such an expedient is 
sometimes entirely successful. There is a 
scene in "Jane Eyre," where Jane, in a frenzy 
of mingled jealousy and self -martyrdom, sets 
herself down before her mirror and paints 
with remorseless fidelity her own plain face, 
then paints from memory a portrait of the 
beautiful lady whom she imagines to be her 



THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 171 

rival in the affections of Rochester, The 
action is perfectly natural. I believe Jane 
was always looking in the glass, not because 
she admired herself, but because she did not. 
And this pricking consciousness of her own 
appearance pervades the whole narrative, so 
that one has in its perusal very little of this 
sense that I have been speaking of, of viewing 
the hero entirely from within. 

This could be achieved in the fictitious 
autobiography of Jane, just as it was in the 
real autobiography of Marie Bashkirtseff ; but 
there are types of women with whom it could 
not be done — women like Dorothea Brooke 
or Clara Middleton. Clara, struggling hope- 
less in the net of circumstance, yet flashing 
keen lights on the people about her, could 
never turn such light on herself. She was 
unaware of her own physical loveliness, — • 
her walk, her hair as it curled about her ears 
and neck. Call such things trifling and exter- 
nal if you will, yet it is through such trifling 
externals that some of our deepest and most 
instinctive impressions arise. 

But if self-portraiture is not natural to all 
women, still less is it so to most men. In 



172 THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 

Locke's "Simon the Jester," for example, we 
find our hero writing thus: "I looked at him 
and smiled, perhaps a little wearily. One can 
always command one's eyes, but one's lips get 
sometimes out of control. He could not have 
noticed my lips, however." Instantly we de- 
tect the note of falseness here. Such a man 
would not have carefully written down the 
fact that he smiled wearily, and that his friend 
did not notice his lips. Oscar Wilde would 
have been aware of such a fact about himself, 
and when in "Dorian Grey" he makes his 
hero run to the mirror to catch his own ex- 
pression before it fades, we do not challenge 
it, though we may perhaps question whether 
Dorian Grey was worth writing about at all. 
But we do not expect such things from Simon 
de Gex — we do not expect such things from 
most men. Of course the fact was, that the 
author of Simon wanted us to know that 
Simon's smile was a weary one, and no way 
of making this clear occurred to him, except 
that of having Simon himseK admit that he 
smiled wearily. This little passage is not a 
momentary slip. It is typical of the whole 
book, which might be used as an illustration 



THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 173 

of the way in which an unfortunate method of 
telling the story acts as a handicap from be- 
ginning to end. With a rather unusual and 
very interesting situation to set forth, the 
author has thrown away his chance of making 
it seem "inevitable" by setting up at the 
start a postulate in which we can never ac- 
quiesce — the postulate of Simon de Gex 
writing himself up. 

Clearly, description of the hero by himself 
is dangerous tactics. Yet, where it is not 
attempted, we miss it. The weakness of the 
latter part of De Morgan's "Joseph Vance" 
is, I believe, due not entirely to the fact that 
his father died out of the story, but also, 
among other things, to the fact that Joseph 
himself, being grown-up, could no longer 
regard himself impersonally enough to make 
his personality vivid to us. And readers of 
the book, if they are at all like me, carry 
away from it a vivid picture of Joseph Vance 
the boy, but a very pale picture of Joseph 
Vance the man. 

It is, perhaps, the endeavor to escape from 
some of these pitfalls that beset the auto- 
biographical form, and yet to profit by its 



174 THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 

opportunities, which leads writers to try 
another expedient — that is, to let the story 
be told, not by the hero, but by the hero's 
friend. "The Beloved Vagabond" is done in 
this way, and very cleverly done. Clearly, it 
could never have been told by the Vagabond 
himself. An outside view of him was indis- 
pensable. He could never, without stepping 
entirely out of his own character, have set 
forth, or even dimly suggested, the portrait 
of himself, of his whole whimsical, lovable 
personality, as it is set forth by his young 
friend and protege, the street waif, little 
Asticot. 

The objection to this method is, that the 
teller of the story, not having the hero's deci- 
sive influence on the action, is apt to fade into 
a nonentity, a shadowy person, so that one 
scarcely remembers him. In "The Beloved 
Vagabond " this is not true of the first part of 
the book. There, as in "Joseph Vance," the 
narrator is looking back upon his own child- 
self. But as little Asticot grows up, and be- 
comes the narrator of his patron's story, he 
himself recedes, we have no clear picture of 
him. 



THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 175 

Similarly in "The Newcomes," the nar- 
rator-friend keeps himself so entirely in the 
background that I fancy many of us have not 
realized at all that the story is actually told 
by one of the characters, and not by Thack- 
eray himself. And I think we may all admit 
that in this volmne Pendennis, considered 
simply as the narrator of the Newcomes' his- 
tory, is very close to a nonentity. 

But if a nonentity, why there at all? If 
the actor-narrator pales to a mere literary 
convention, what is there to gain by keeping 
him? 

Very little to gain, and something to lose. 
For, whether hero or hero's friend, the teller 
of the story, once committed to his task of 
accounting for himself, and for his possession 
of all the facts of the narrative, cannot lay 
it down. He must keep on accounting for 
himself. Every time he narrates an event of 
which he was not himself an eye-witness, he 
must explain how he found out about it. If 
he fails to do this satisfactorily, the entire 
fabric of probability so carefully built up by 
the author topples and falls. How does little 
Asticot know that the English lady is his 



176 THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 

master's old love? How does he know there 
was an old love at all? He must account for it 
— and does. He saw some old letters, some 
verses, he put two and two together. We 
are satisfied this time, but the question may 
arise again, and we shall need to be satisfied 
again. 

Pendennis, conscious of this necessity of 
accounting for his information, was not so 
inclined to meet it in this way. He was aware 
that he could never follow the rules of the 
game if he interpreted them too strictly, and 
so made a sort of general confession, a blanket 
apology, which is worth quoting at length 
because it so clearly sets forth the diflSculties 
which beset the actor-narrator: — 

*'In the present volumes, where dialogues 
are written down which the reporter could by 
no possibility have heard, and where motives 
are detected which the persons actuated by 
them certainly never confided to the writer, 
the public must, once for all, be warned that 
the author's individual fancy very likely sup- 
plies much of the narrative; and that he 
forms it as best he may, out of stray papers, 
conversations reported to him, and his knowl- 



THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 177 

edge, right or wrong, of the characters of the 
persons engaged. And, as is the case with the 
most orthodox histories, the writer's own 
guesses or conjectures are printed in exactly 
the same type as the most ascertained patent 
facts. I fancy, for my part, that the speeches 
attributed to Clive, the Colonel, and the rest 
are as authentic as the orations in Sallust or 
Livy, and only implore the truth-loving pub- 
lic to believe that incidents here told, and 
which passed very probably without wit- 
nesses, were either confided to me subse- 
quently as compiler of this biography, or are 
of such a nature that they must have hap- 
pened from what we know happened after. 
For example, when you read such words as 
' que Romanus ' on a battered Roman stone, 
your profound antiquarian knowledge enables 
you to assert that 'Senatus Populus' was 
also inscribed there at some time or other. 
. . . You tell your tales as you can, and state 
the facts as you think they must have been. 
In this manner Mr. James, Titus Livius, 
Sheriff Alison, Robinson Crusoe, and all 
historians proceeded. Blunders there must 
be in the best of these narratives, and more 



178 THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 

asserted than they can possibly know or 
vouch for." 

There are very few heroes, or hero's friends, 
who have taken such hberties, but then few 
have told so good a story as "The Newcomes." 
I fancy we are ready to grant Mr. Pendennis 
all the privileges he demands, yet I cannot 
help feeling that Thackeray set him rather 
too hard a task — a task which, indeed, he 
might better have assumed himself. In fact, 
I have this feeling about many of the novels 
cast in the autobiographical form. They may 
be good stories as they are, but they might, I 
suspect, have been just a little better if the 
author had not limited his own powers by 
bundling himself up in the clothes and the 
mask and the wig of one of the characters. 
I do not feel this about all such novels. Some 
of them seem to me just right as they are, 
and after any number of experiments with 
them — fancying them re-written in this way 
and that — I come back to the author's 
choice as the best. This is the case with 
"Lorna Doone" and "Henry Esmond" and 
"Jane Eyre " and "Kidnapped" and "Treas- 
ure Island" and "Joseph Vance." 



THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 179 

It seems like a curious company of books 
to be named in one sentence. Yet, after all, 
they are of only two kinds: stories of inner 
experience, told by an introspective hero; and 
stories of adventure, told by a hero of naive 
temperament with a clear grip on the prac- 
tical in life. That is, in each case, the hero is 
fitted to his task. John Ridd could not have 
written Esmond's story nor Esmond John 
Ridd's, but John Ridd was perfectly capable 
of writing his own, and Esmond his. Jane 
Eyre's story, told by any one but herself, 
would lose something of its value. Told by 
herself, it is wonderfully impressive as a hu- 
man document. The life she portrays could 
not, perhaps, have been what she saw it, but 
this is how she actually did see it. There never 
was a man like Mr. Rochester, perhaps. But 
nobody cares about that. What we are con- 
cerned with is her idea of Mr. Rochester. And 
we are convinced that there was a woman 
who felt about a man what she felt about 
Mr. Rochester. The whole book is, in fact, 
lyric. 

It is the record of a temperament buffeted 
about by the impact of people and circum- 



180 THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 

stance, which are viewed only as they affect 
this temperament. Whether you hke that 
kind of temperament or not is another mat- 
ter. Given the subject, the book rings true, 
and the lyric form was undoubtedly the best 
for it. 

In his search for the "inevitable," then, 
the writer has, after all, nothing to gain by 
resorting to the expedient of the actor-narra- 
tor, unless this actor-narrator is himself inev- 
itable, — unless his part as teller of the story 
fits him so perfectly as to require no apology. 
This will hardly be the case except with a 
very limited class of adventure stories, and 
with a larger class of stories which are the 
records of an introspective nature. With 
these exceptions, he usually does better if he 
works with free hands, — if, taking as his own 
the apology of Pendennis, he quietly supplies 
the missing words of the inscription, tells his 
tales as he can, and states the facts as he 
thinks they must have been. And if his under- 
standing of life be deep enough, he will create 
in us the illusion of reality just as surely as if 
he had sought to establish it by letters and 
diaries. 



THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 181 

Even when freed from a certain kind of 
accountability, he need not necessarily take 
any more liberties with his characters than 
the hero would have done. "Pride and Preju- 
dice," for example, is told almost as Elizabeth 
would have told it herself if she had written 
it. Hardly any information is given but what 
she knew, and Darcy's character is not fully 
cleared up until it is cleared in her eyes. In 
the "Three Musketeers" the story is told as 
D'Artagnan might have told it. What is a 
mystery to him remains a mystery to the 
reader. His estimate of the other characters 
dominates the story. Yet, not being told by 
him, but by an irresponsible author,, the tale 
is carried on with a lightness and freedom 
that D'Artagnan himself, writing in charac- 
ter, could hardly have achieved. Howells, in 
*'The Rise of Silas Lapham," tells the story 
from the standpoint of Mr. Lapham, or, 
now and then, from that of Mrs. Lapham. 
We are allowed to follow, to some extent, 
the workings of their minds, but their two 
daughters are treated externally. As we 
follow their fortunes and try to predict the 
outcome, we have little more to go upon 



182 THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 

than their parents had. This is Howells's 
usual method, and it is the method of much 
modern writing. 

Mr. James, in "The Other House," carries 
the external point of view to such an extreme 
that at the end of the book, when the evidence 
is all in, there is still room for question, among 
intelligent people, as to what really happened; 
and even more room for disagreement as to 
v^hat the motives of the characters were. 
Mr. James also furnishes us the best example 
I can think of, of the other extreme, where the 
treatment is exclusively internal. In a curi- 
ous piece of writing, "In the Cage," which I 
cannot help thinking was a bit of pure experi- 
menting, he attempts to set forth the spiritual 
states of a girl telegrapher — states of which 
she herself was only dimly aware, impulses 
which never reached consciousness, feelings 
which she never more than half confessed, 
even to herself. 

Between these two extremes most of the 
best story-telling is done. Authors do not 
often openly assume omniscience: they treat 
their material from the standpoint of an 
impartial witness. Yet, when omniscience is 



THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 183 

needed to explain character and interpret 
motive, — 

" All that the world's coarse thumb 
And finger failed to plumb, — ** 

it is assumed without apology, and the reader 
grants it without demur. If we think of parts 
of "Vanity Fair" and " Middlemarch " and 
"The Mill on the Floss," of "Richard 
Feverel" and "The Portrait of a Lady," of 
"Somehow Good" and "Tess," and many 
others, we realize what we should be giving 
up if writers had tied themselves down to the 
autobiographical form. The more one thinks 
of it, the more one feels sure that, tempting 
as it is, its restrictions outweigh its oppor- 
tunities. 

And yet — one comes back to "Henry Es- 
mond," and one remembers "Joseph Vance," 
and one cannot be satisfied to end the matter 
in a hard judgment like that. For there is a 
certain quality in these stories which endears 
them to us in a peculiar way, and which, I 
believe, is specially fostered by the autobio- 
graphical form in which they are cast. There 
is a certain type of story with this quality 



184 THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 

potentially inherent in it, which no other 
manner of telHng could so well bring out. It 
is a story like "Henry Esmond/' the story of 
a long life, told as by one who has lived it, 
while he rests, near its end, and looks back. 

The love of reminiscence is deep-rooted in 
us. We do not need to have length of years in 
order to possess it. All we need to have is a 
consciousness of the past as past. Some years 
ago, a little friend of mine, then four years 
old, attained a new phrase: "Don't you re- 
member?" I say "attained," because it was 
evident that she had not only enlarged her 
field of expression by a new word, but that 
she had enlarged her field of experience by 
a new sensation, — the sensation of reminis- 
cence. For the phrase, "Don't you remem- 
ber.^" always ushered in a story out of her 
small past, some event of the preceding win- 
ter or summer, some glimpse of history in 
which she had been actor or witness. It was 
always uttered with shining eyes and a flush 
of dehght, which deepened if I was able to 
catch her reminiscence and recognize and en- 
joy it with her. Yet the things remembered 
were very simple, — a drive, a walk, a kitten. 



THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 185 

a child watering his garden or faUing down. 
The pleasure came, clearly, not from the orig- 
inal quality of the experience, but from the 
very act of remembering. She was tasting the 
pure pleasure of reminiscence. Watching her, 
I fell to wondering what was the precious 
quality of this pleasure whose flavor she was 
beginning to taste. 

The charm of memory lies, I think, in the 
quality which it gives things, at once of inti- 
macy and remoteness. The fascination to us 
of recalling our past selves, our former sur- 
roundings, lies in our sense that they are ab- 
solutely known to us, yet absolutely out of our 
reach. We can recall places, houses, rooms, 
until every detail lives again. We can turn 
from one thing to another and, as we look at 
each, lo, it is there! It has a reality more 
poignant than the hand that we touch or the 
flower that we smell. Sometimes, it is true, 
present experiences, even as they occur, have 
something of this quality. They do not need 
to recede into the past to gain this glamour. 
Certain places have it : cathedrals sometimes, 
and still lakes. Certain things foster it: fire- 
light, and silence, and the steady fall of rain. 



186 THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 

Certain moments give birth to it: the lumin- 
ous pause between sundown and dusk, after- 
noon with its slant of light through deep grass 
or across a quiet river. This, I fancy, was what 
Tennyson was thinking of when he called the 
lotus land the land "wherein it seemed al- 
ways afternoon." In that land these magic 
moments were prolonged, and thus it became 
the land of reminiscence. 

My little friend was a thought too young, 
perhaps, to have entered into this land. It is 
a place where we do not expect to meet many 
children. Girls in their twenties sometimes 
slip in, when they have time, and boys in their 
teens, and then again, — well, perhaps, boys 
in their fifties. Indeed the forties and fifties 
are the usual time for a first real sojourn in 
these pleasant meadows. One looks over the 
hedge, or slips through a gap, haK by acci- 
dent, and finding it fair within, one comes 
back. And again one comes back, and each 
time one stays longer and wanders farther. 
And as one grows to know it better, one dis- 
covers that there is more than a meadow be- 
yond the hedge. There are many meadows, 
and great woods and rivers and cities. And 



THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 187 

the delight of it is, that everything there is 
like something one has seen before, only love- 
lier. For, just as still water interprets and 
recreates the life it reflects, so in the land of 
memory life is rendered again with a tender- 
ness that is a most precious kind of truth. 

It is not to every one, nor to any one at all 
times, that the mood of reminiscence comes 
in its perfection. Often its rarer pleasures are 
obscured by a pain that is no necessary part 
of its quality, of tener they are never given the 
chance to reveal themselves. They require for 
their enjoyment a contemplative spirit, a soul 
at leisure, that the waters of memory may be 
still and clear, mirroring the images of things 
now plainly, line for line, now blurred and 
softened by light winds of oblivion that make 
the vision all the more lovely. 

But this is not a contemplative age, nor is 
leisure of spirit its chief characteristic. There 
is little encouragement given to the reminis- 
cent mood, either in literature or in life. Lit- 
erary endeavor is in the direction of concise- 
ness and swiftness. Its motto is Stevenson's : 
*'War to the adjective! Death to the optic 
nerve!" 



188 THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 

This is very good. But there is another 
kind of thing that is good, too: the kind of 
thing that comes with the brooding vision, 
with the remoteness that permits a broader 
focus and a greater dehberateness of treat- 
ment, that finds expression in abundance of 
deHcately-wrought detail. This it is which, for 
lack of a better name, I am calling the rem- 
iniscent manner. One meets it in some poetry, 
and now and then in such prose as Richard 
Jefferies's. Its most complete and exquisite 
embodiment is surely in that rare and perfect 
prose lyric, Walter Pater's "Child in the 
House." One might expect to find it most of 
all in the real autobiography, since this is the 
avowed form of reminiscence. But they are 
disappointing, these genuine autobiographers. 
For one thing, they are hampered by their 
facts. Stevenson was quite right when he said 
that a finished biography was " not nearly so 
finished as quite a rotten novel " ; and not only 
in finish but in other ways it is at a disadvan- 
tage compared with fiction. Sometimes its 
writers may have mistaken notions of their 
obligation to suppress their own personali- 
ties; they must always have instincts of re- 



THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 189 

serve which we cannot fail to understand. At 
all events, they do not wander in the fields of 
reminiscence with the free step and the joyous 
abandon that we could desire. Yet, even so, 
the rule holds that we have noticed with re- 
gard to novels : the chapters dealing with their 
*' early years" often possess a charm that is 
lacking in the rest of the narrative. For there 
is a power in the long backward look that 
inevitably transfigures. 

And so it is often to the make-believe auto- 
biographies that we turn for something that 
is in its essence not make-believe at all, but 
a reality of experience. The satisfaction that 
they give is not of a kind to be justified or 
made clear by reading sample passages. It is 
born of the writer's attitude, which through 
intimacy with him we come to share. Merely 
to think of "Henry Esmond" is often enough 
to throw one into a mood of contemplative 
reminiscence. A lover of "Joseph Vance" has 
but to open the book anywhere for a moment 
and the color of his thought is changed — he 
is captured by this charm of the long back- 
ward look and the brooding vision. And if 
through the magic of the mood we are floated 



190 THE NOVELIST'S CHOICE 

a little aside from the remorseless current of 
immediate living, yet the realities which we 
thus come to feel are indeed realities, whose 
recognition we deeply crave, and to whose 
expression in literature we give eager and 
loving welcome.^ 



The Literary Uses of Experience 

"Did you enjoy it very much?" asked a lady 
of a little girl whom she met coming away 
from an entertainment. "Yes," answered the 
child, but there was a note of reservation in 
her voice. Then she threw back her head half 
defiantly and added, "But don't you think 
it 's hard that I can never go to anything with- 
out having to go home and write an account of 
it afterwards? " Hard, indeed! And yet harder 
that the tyrant who imposed the requirement 
happened to be the child's mother — one 
of those overtrained and overanxious people 
who continue to bring the higher educa- 
tion of women into disrepute. Of course, our 
sympathies are all with the little girl. We 
recognize that her protest was a sign, not of 
naughtiness, but of health. There was some- 
thing wrong about this continual exploiting of 
immediate experience, and she knew it and 
rebelled against it. The little incident has 
lain in my mind for years, serving as a nucleus 
round which ruminating thoughts have gath- 



192 LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 

ered regarding the whole subject of the Ht- 
erary uses of experience. 

The writer of fiction, if he is at once sensi- 
tive and conscientious, must often find him- 
self in a dilemma. He is urged to " write out 
of his own experience," since otherwise his 
work will not ring true. Look at Jane Austen, 
he is told, sitting quiet and feminine imder her 
lamp and writing her tales of the little every- 
day doings of little everyday folk! Behold her, 
even refusing to undertake the great histori- 
cal romance urged upon her by Royalty itself, 
because it "fell outside her experience." Here 
is a model for all young writers. Very well. 
The obedient artist turns him to the life about 
him, and, sure enough, there is indeed plenty 
of material. Here is an aunt who, considered 
as a "character," is ripe to be picked and set 
in a book. Here is a sister-in-law, whose ex- 
periences with her servants, literally set down, 
would make a most readable and instructive 
set of papers for some woman's journal. Or, 
in sterner vein, here is a brother or a friend 
whose business experience or whose love- 
affair offers a tempting subject. Finally, the 
writer realizes that in his own life he has only 



LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 193 

to put forth his hand and take what he needs. 
Yes, for once the general voice is speaking 
the truth : his material does, indeed, lie close 
about him. 

Suppose, then, he takes it, uses it. We 
know very well what happens: "Have you 
read that last thing by young Bellerophon? 
The one about the Lady and the Cook.^^ Of 
course we all know who it is he means — she 
simply can't keep a cook — it 's the scandal 
of the street, the number she has in a month. 
But I don't think that gives him any right — 
you know what I mean? " If it is his own ex- 
perience he has used, the results are different, 
but no better: "You saw that story of his.f* 
Yes — it is interesting. I suppose you knew 
it was his own experience — yes, he went all 
through that a few years ago — oh, he 's all 
right now, but his family felt terribly at the 
time, and I could n't help wondering how 
they'd like to see it all — sort of spread out 
in print this way." 

Has it then always been so? Did Eurip- 
ides's contemporaries look askance at him 
because, under the thin disguise of Clytem- 
nestra, he had written up a sister-in-law? Did 



194 LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 

those who Kstened to Sappho's lyrics shudder 
a Httle and murmur, "Beautiful, of course, 
but — how could she?" Did Horace's ac- 
quaintance raise their eyebrows over some of 
the personalities in the odes? And did Ca- 
tuUus's pretty little lady wish he had not 
coined her and her pet bird into verse? We 
cannot tell. Time has wiped out the original 
material, whatever it was, and left only the 
artistic rendering. 

About our contemporaries, however, one 
hears persistent rumors : here is one composing 
a poem on his son's death even before the 
burial, and handing it to a friend for possible 
publication. Here is another using the love- 
aflfairs of his friends — quite recognizably — 
to make his plots. Here is another setting one 
of our centers of social service aflame with 
indignation because she had, in their opinion, 
written them up. Here is a New England 
town boiling over with resentment because 
one to whom they had shown hospitality 
had rewarded them by "putting them into a 
book." I saw recently a newspaper notice of 
a suit brought by a man against his wife be- 
cause, as he alleged, her latest novel made use 



LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 195 

of their life together in such a way as to re- 
flect unpleasantly on his character. 

Whether in these and other cases the com- 
plainants are justified, it is neither possible 
nor necessary to consider. The moral ques- 
tion involved in the use of real life is so com- 
plex that each instance would have to be 
handled separately. It was once, they say, 
decided that a man might sniff the odors of 
another man's dinner without having to pay 
for it, but whether he may bottle the aroma of 
another man's life while it is yet hot, for the 
purpose of serving it again, perhaps cold or 
lukewarm, to the general public, is quite an- 
other matter. It is at least clear that the use 
of experience may be fraught with perplexity 
for the writer. There is a curiously frank ac- 
knowledgment of this in a short story by Mrs. 
Wharton, called " Copy. " It represents two 
authors, a man and a woman, who had once 
been in love with each other, meeting after 
the lapse of years. Each has the other's old 
love-letters, and each suddenly realizes what 
wonderful "copy" these would make. There 
is much skillful and intricate fencing between 
them, but at last, moved by a scarcely ac- 



196 LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 

knowledged reverence for the past, by some 
obscure impulse of loyalty to it, they burn all 
the letters. The story may serve as a reminder 
that, whereas we are apt to know the cases 
where writers have yielded to temptation, — 
if temptation it be, — we do not know the 
cases where they have resisted. 

But such recognition by authors themselves 
of the moral problems involved seems to be 
rather rare. In general, though readers may 
question or condemn, the writer himself is 
likely to be unconscious of offense. I met an 
instance of this once when I was thrown for a 
short time with a writer of stories. She had 
told me a good deal about her life at a certain 
period several years before, and among other 
matters had mentioned a teapot of delicate 
workmanship, and how it happened to get 
broken. Later, reading her newest book, I 
came upon the incident of the teapot. As I 
went on, I noticed other correspondences with 
what I knew to be fact. I was interested, and 
one day I brought the thing up. "It gives a 
good deal of your life in Rouen that winter, 
does n't it.^" I said, innocent of offense. In- 
stantly her color flamed and her eyes showed 



LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 197 

deep annoyance. She took me up quickly: 
"It has nothing whatever to do with my hfe 
there. How could you have supposed that.^" 
Naturally, I dropped the matter, but, that 
being my first close encounter with the artis- 
tic temperament, I was very much puzzled. 
There was no doubting her sincerity, but 
there was also no doubting the fact that her 
life of that winter had got into her book. 

Again, a young girl, just out of college, 
wrote her first novel. Her college friends read 
it with consternation. "But," they exclaimed, 
"this is Anna herself! This is Anna's step- 
mother! This is just what did happen that 
time when her father died! This is not a 
novel, it is a diary! Anna is going too far." 
But two years later Anna wrote another novel, 
containing more shocks for her friends. Here, 
they claimed, was Anna's engagement and 
marriage. Here was Anna's husband. Here 
were her experiences at the birth of her child. 
They approached her about it. What satis- 
faction did they get.^^ Just as Uttle as I got in 
the teapot incident. Anna absolutely denied 
any connection between her novel and her 
own life, and Anna was truth itself. At the 



198 LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 

same time, Anna, speaking as an artist, ex 
cathedra, said firmly, that if anything in her 
life should be needed for the artistic com- 
pleteness of her literary work, she would not 
hesitate to use it, art being in a realm so much 
higher than one's personal feelings. 

From all this, it is obvious enough that 
something happens to the artist, while he is 
artist, which imposes on him standards dif- 
ferent from ours — different even from his 
own when he is not in the artistic mood. So 
that although as ordinary man in ordinary 
intercourse he may, for example, be a most 
reserved person, who would find it easier to 
cut out his own heart and slice it up for his 
friends than to cull out bits of his deepest life 
and serve them up in conversation, yet on the 
printed page we may find him doing something 
very much like this — exploiting in luminous 
paragraphs moods and feelings which to most 
of us seem too deep-lying to be touched upon, 
save by allusive implication, even with our 
most beloved friends. I have read articles in 
the magazines that made me uncomfortable, 
not because they were shocking on the few 
lines along which one is conventionally sup- 



LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 199 

posed to be shocked, but because they seemed 
to me to involve such crude exposure of the 
soul as nothing but hysteria could excuse. A 
friend of mine, trying to read a certain essay 
— if one may apply the term to a ten-page 
prose lyric expressing the author's personal 
mood — suddenly threw it down, exclaiming, 
"This is too painful — it's raw! It's bleed- 
ing!" At first glance, one is inclined to put 
such writers in the class with a certain little 
girl I knew, who climbed up into her mother's 
lap and said, with more than a suggestion of 
gloating anticipation, "Now, mother, let's 
talk about my faults!" But is it perhaps we 
who are wrong? Is our vaunted New Eng- 
land reserve, after all, at fault? Are these 
writers showing us the way, and is there in the 
future to be no reserve in life as there is, 
apparently, for them, none in art? Or are we 
trying to reconcile two different worlds when 
we allow ourselves to be troubled by the art- 
ist's intimacy of revelation? Are we shrink- 
ing from the spiritual nude in art as some peo- 
ple still shrink from the physical nude, merely 
because our artistic perceptions have been 
incompletely developed? 



200 LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 

These are questions which I am better pre- 
pared to ask than to answer, yet a sidehght 
on them has seemed to come through my 
meditations on memory. For years it has 
beset me, this thought of the magic possessed 
by memory. Where it touches it transforms. 
Nearly everybody's memory is artistic, or at 
any rate more nearly artistic than his im- 
mediate perceptions. Children are following 
a true instinct when they beg for a story 
*' about something you remember, that hap- 
pened a long time ago," for the things that 
we thus remember have a way of gathering 
into themselves any flavor of poetic feeling 
that may be in our nature. What is it, then, 
that memory does? 

For one thing, it selects. In our immedi- 
ate perceptions we often cannot see the 
woods for the trees. Memory knows no such 
trouble. Its trees are often blurred, but its 
woods stretch far and blue, dark-shadowed 
and full of meanings. For another, it dis- 
tances. Through it we escape from the im- 
portunity of practical issues. Memory knows 
no practical issues; things are clear but we 
cannot alter them, they are real but we can 



LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 201 

neither seize nor avoid them. The hght of 
memory is a Hght that never was on sea or 
land — mellow and soft, full of tender inter- 
pretations, of delicate emphases, of exquisite 
withdrawals. 

If memory, then, is a kind of art, art is a 
kind of memory. Like memory it selects, like 
memory it interprets. It, too, has its emphases 
and its withdrawals, and like memory it cre- 
ates its own remoteness. For to see beauty, 
or, more broadly, to see the world with our 
perceptions alert to its aesthetic significance, 
we must withdraw from it, we must hold it 
away from us. While we are seeing the beauty 
of the lion who crouches in the jungle grass, 
we do, in that instant of perception, ignore 
the necessity for killing him, the danger of his 
killing us. Wandering in a white sea-fog over 
the marshes, we may, in a realization of its 
weird loveliness, entirely lose our sense of the 
menace it holds for us. These things take 
upon themselves, for the moment, something 
of the quality of memories. Was it, as Gil- 
bert Murray suggests, an acknowledgment of 
this kinship between memory and art, that 
the Greeks wove into the fiber of their philo- 



202 LITEBARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 

sophic myth, when they made Memory the 
mother of the Muses? 

But the relation is one of kinship only, not 
of identity. For whereas the remoteness of 
memory is unalterable and eternal, the re- 
moteness of our art-perceptions is apt to be 
momentary, and in part at least a matter of 
our own choice. While memory gently but 
insistently urges us into something much like 
the aesthetic attitude toward the treasures it 
offers us, real life, with its lions, and its fog, 
makes a more complex appeal. There is only 
one way to take memory, but there are two 
ways of taking life, the aesthetic and the prac- 
tical. Between these two there is a plenteous 
lack of understanding. "What right," says 
the practical man, ''have you to stand around 
just looking at lions and fog, when there is so 
much that is really important to be done 
about them.f^" He views everything in one of 
two aspects : it is either a thing that he can do 
something to, or it is a thing that can do 
something to him. He thinks of things, not as 
they are, but with reference to what he would 
like to do with them or to them. Perception 
for its own sake, expression for its own sake. 



LITERAKY USES OF EXPERIENCE 203 

makes no appeal to him. Even memory he 
forces into practical service, and allows its 
other powers to atrophy. 

At the other extreme is the aesthete, who 
lives to taste the flavors of his perceptions and 
to express them. "Lions and fog are so won- 
derful," he cries, "Look at them! Only look!" 
And while the practical man calls him a 
dreamer and a trifler and a shirk, he calls the 
practical man a barbarian and a prude, who 
is afraid to look at life as it really is. He 
undergoes experience as all men must, but 
almost in the moment of its occurrence it be- 
comes something apart from him, delicately 
valued in the withdrawal of the aesthetic 
mood. Thus life for him is continually under- 
going such a transmutation as for most of us 
only the magic of memory can bring about. 
While he is yet white with indignation, he 
may say to himself, "This is anger." While 
he loves, he realizes, "This is indeed passion." 
Probably the two moods, of emotion and ap- 
preciation, are not really simultaneous, they 
may alternate with lightning-like interplay. 
But they seem to the observer, and even, 
perhaps, to the possessor, like two streams 



204 LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 

flowing on together, like two runners racing 
abreast, one oblivious of all but the mad mo- 
tion, the other with eyes, not on the goal, not 
blind with the rush of it, but turned, deeply 
observant, on the face of his companion. 

It is, then, this capacity for immediate 
aloofness from experience, this power of with- 
drawal into a realm closely resembling that of 
memory, which makes possible for the artist 
some of the things that shock us. But though 
it may to some extent explain his state of 
mind, it does not perhaps make us approve of 
it any more heartily. For there is something 
repellent to us in the ability thus to distance 
experience, either one's own or another's. It 
seems not quite warmly human. When 
memory, through its distancing power, grad- 
ually and gently loosens the bonds of reserve, 
we permit it, we even love it, because it is a 
universal experience. But when the aesthetic 
mood loosens these bonds, not gradually but 
at once, by merely, as it were, taking a step 
to one side, we shrink a little. An old man, we 
feel, may say things of his youth that his 
youth could not have said of itseK even if it 
had known them. 



LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 205 

What we probably do not realize is that 
people differ enormously in their rate of re- 
action to life. An experience which in one 
person may after its occurrence not come to 
full fruition in consciousness for months or 
years, may in another pass through the same 
phases in a few hours or even minutes. Yet 
the lower rate is so much commoner that 
there is a presumption against the immediate 
coining of experience into artistic expression. 
If, after a great bereavement, a man sits 
down at once and embodies it in a poem, if, 
when an overwhelming passion has barely 
burned itself out, he proceeds to set it forth 
in a novel, we find ourselves suspecting, even 
before we examine the case, that either the 
bereavement and the passion will prove to 
have been not so overwhelming after all, or 
else that their artistic rendering will prove 
not really artistic. 

This last point is one which needs some at- 
tention. So far I have been considering the 
use of experience chiefly in its ethical aspects. 
It is clear that the use of other people as ma- 
terial for art often exposes writers to sharp 
and persistent criticism. I have suggested 



206 LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 

that there are reasons grounded in the proc- 
esses of the artistic temperament, why this 
criticism is often not in the least understood 
by the writers themselves. But, aside from 
this question of the moral right of an artist to 
make use of another's life, there is a second 
question, namely, what is the effect of the 
immediate use of experience on the art-prod- 
uct itseK? Morals aside, does it tend to pro- 
duce good art? In the case of one's own life, 
for instance, where it may be argued that one 
has the moral right to use whatever one likes, 
it might be of interest to inquire whether, 
purely from the effect on the art-product, it 
is not often a mistake to hurry forward into 
expression. The continual tasting and label- 
ing of sensation tends to make sensation itself 
a little thin, or at least not quite true. And 
it is conceivable that lions and fog can never 
be completely grasped, even aesthetically, 
save by one who has first, in complete aban- 
donment to practical needs, fought the lions 
and groped through the fog. Experience, 
entered upon with a conscious aesthetic pur- 
pose, may be thus deprived of its last, keenest 
quality, and even when not thus taken, it 



LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 207 

may, if too hastily garnered into expression, 
never reach, even as pure expression, the 
mellowness of maturity that might otherwise 
have been attained. 

The pressure upon the artist urging him to 
serve green fruit instead of waiting for it to 
ripen, has, of course, never been so great as 
now. But there is, I believe, pressure of an- 
other sort, far stronger and far more respect- 
able, arising naturally and inevitably out of 
our present habits of thought. With the 
enormous growth of scientific interest — in- 
terest in facts, and faith in what they may 
lead us to — we have developed a reverence 
for accuracy, patience, thoroughness, and dis- 
crimination. "Study your own thumb-nail 
enough," Agassiz used to say, "and you will 
find enough to occupy you for a lifetime." And 
he was fond of testing young students by giv- 
ing them a cross-section of a broom-handle 
and seeing what they made of it. This was 
excellent. Applied to coral islands and earth- 
worms and infusoria and sea-urchins, it is 
producing stupendous results. And now at- 
tention is being turned inward upon the hu- 
man spirit itself — not, indeed, for the first 



208 LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 

time, but for the first time with just these 
methods. Man himself, as Walter Bagehot 
pointed out a generation ago, has become an 
antiquity — that is, a subject for scientific 
investigation. And the artist as well as the 
scientist has caught the habit of thumb-nail 
study and inspection of broom-handle sec- 
tions. This too is excellent. It is compelling 
writers to an honesty of aim, a meticulous pre- 
cision in technique, of a kind that has never 
been equaled. The scientist who would sit 
in his study and write about the processes of 
nature "out of his head" is now in disrepute. 
Similarly, the journalist who would write 
about the poor without first having "done 
the slums" would be very much behind the 
times. We may swing back again to a love 
for the fantastic and fanciful, but at present 
we are lost in admiration of the obviously 
truthful. 

These things go by waves. For there is al- 
ways a tendency, when we have become im- 
pressed with the excellence of some quality, to 
see that quality everywhere, to the exclusion 
of all others. If we love blue, we see blue in 
everything. If we have been deeply moved by 



LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 209 

the excellence of courage, or of honesty, or of 
kindness, we translate all the moral virtues 
into terms of sincerity or honesty or kindness. 
There are reasons, in the underlying unity of 
the world, why this can rather easily be done, 
both with colors and with moral qualities, 
but it has to be done carefully. 

So with theories of art. Sometimes it is 
attempted to state all the aesthetic virtues in 
terms of morality. Ruskin did this very ap- 
pealingly but not quite satisfyingly. Often 
they have been stated in terms of beauty, and 
this also has its pitfalls. Just now, in the flush 
of our enthusiasm for the ideals which science 
seems to have set up, we are stating them in 
terms of sincerity. This disposes of certain 
problems, for instance, the problem of ugli- 
ness; but it leads to other difficulties. For 
even in the scientific observation of fact there 
is such a thing as losing the significance of 
detail through absorption in its immediate 
aspects, and this is yet more easily possible in 
the realm of art. There may have been a time 
when artists needed to be called sharply to ac- 
count for the sincerity of their intention and 
the accuracy of their work, but at present they 



210 LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 

are much more apt to offer us these in place 
of something else that would be of still greater 
value. We are all of us in danger of falling into 
two fallacies: first, of assuming that accuracy 
of detail in the art-product is the most neces- 
sary condition of its high quality as art, and 
second — granting that such accuracy is very 
desirable — the fallacy of assuming that it 
will necessarily be attained in the highest de- 
gree through sincere study and immediately 
faithful rendering of detail. If our theory 
makes these two assumptions, it becomes very 
diflScult to explain why a monument of honest 
and masterly self -analysis like Amiel's "Jour- 
nal" is not, as a work of art, greater than 
"Hamlet." The truth of art has never, per- 
haps, been successfully defined; but we must 
see, when we really face the question, that it 
is something different from sincerity in the 
artist or accuracy in his product. For we have 
to cover the truth of Shakespeare with half 
his detail wrong, the truth of Conrad, with 
all his detail right, the truth of Euripides, 
with whose detail we have now simply noth- 
ing to do, the truth of Rodin, who never 
works from a single pose but expresses an un- 



LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 211 

derstanding born of fused impressions. It 
must be clear that this truth can never be 
expressed, either objectively in terms of ac- 
curacy, or subjectively in terms of sincerity, 
except by wrenching these terms away from 
all their usual connotations. It must rather 
be conceived as a kind of vision that requires, 
indeed, an atmosphere of sincerity and is fed 
by experience — any experience, it hardly 
matters what, — but which requires also a 
certain remoteness and detachment of spirit. 
I sometimes wonder whether we should not 
be gainers if our writers, like the Greeks, did 
a life-work first — a good chunk of hard, 
practically serviceable living — as farmers or 
manufacturers or administrators or teachers, 
and only after this were permitted to fall upon 
their task as artists. De Morgan and Conrad 
among the moderns are shining examples of 
the possibilities of this programme; and with 
them we might class the literary men who 
have most of their lives swung a definite busi- 
ness, carrying on their artistic labors, as it 
were, "with their left hand" — Matthew 
Arnold and Lamb, for example. It is, indeed, 
only rather recently that writing has become 



212 LITERARY USES OF EXPERIENCE 

lucrative enough to permit of its being chosen 
early as a profession. 

Probably we should lose something. Doubt- 
less we should gain something. Doubtless we 
should be spared much of the hasty monger- 
ing of experience to which I have been re- 
ferring. In thinking of this, one is tempted to 
use the neat phrase of that prince of dreamers 
who was also in his lighter moments the prince 
of teases: "You cannot, sir, take from me 
anything that I will more willingly part 
withal." 



THE END 



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